Wednesday Wood Day

Wednesday 3-25

Rain and wind early- our hopes of seeing it dry out enough to get the ruts under control must wait awhile.

The log tongs should have come yesterday, so I checked the tracking from Amazon. It said they were delivered to our mailbox yesterday late afternoon.  Logging tongs fit in our mailbox? It proved to be true: that was some big mailbox I installed.

MM with 1/3 cord.  You can see the tongs over her left shoulder.

Today was a woodshed day- sawing, splitting, and stacking firewood. MM and I split and stacked the rounds we had gathered in the last week and put the new log tongs to work. We have been pencilling out our usage so far (1 1/2 cords) and calculating how much we need by winter. Looks like we need 3-4 cords for the winter months.  And ideally we need to age the wood for two years before burning, so we need to have double that so that it will be aged properly.  Our woodshed may hold 4 cords, so we need to increase storage  too.  After today’s stacking, we have a half cord split. 

1/6 cord stack we're working on now

We learned to cross-stack the ends for better stability.

Good news is, there’s a lot of wood on our property waiting to be gathered.  That does not include living trees, but it does include trees that have fallen due to ice storms, overgrowing their habitat, or having been cut and left on the ground last year- we don't why they were cut and limbed but not harvested, but hey.  We need to stockpile these trees before they rot. And our neighbor Jon has given us a huge douglas fir tree that was felled last year and is lying in a ditch, already cut into rounds for splitting.  I came close to hurting myself trying to load the larger rounds, but now I have rigged up a ramp and attachment point to winch it into the truck, and I have new log tongs to make it easier.

Two rough cut oak slabs with matched faces. 

All this makes the buzz about rocket mass heaters seem pretty interesting.  Claims are these wood powered heaters can reduce fuel use to a fraction of what is needed for other devices.

While we were splitting some oak we salvaged we noticed some interesting grain.  I cut a couple of matched slabs and also some other pieces with the chain saw and I hope to make some one-of-a-kind end tables or something out of it. There is beauty everywhere, if we have eyes to see it.

We quit when we started to stumble around from exhaustion, just about 5; so it worked out well.  I made dinner then, and in its aftermath we are sitting around half-dazed, looking forward to bed time.