Some Saturday morning Hardscrabble Farmer wisdom:
Around here firewood is coin of the realm. About this time every year people get serious about putting in wood against the Winter ahead. Every yard has a pile of split cord wood waiting to be stacked, pyramids of sawed blocks ready to go through the splitter, or sheds crammed full of seasoned sticks air drying for the inevitable. You can tell a lot about the financial position of the homeowner by the way the wood is stacked. The poorer homes toss a blue tarp over the hill of wood and pull out what they need from under a cover of snow all Winter long while those with nicer homes feature stand alone wood sheds, or built in wood closets next to the mudroom where their wood is artistically stacked; black ash usually with it’s butter cream pith glowing in the sun, or the russet color of red oak the two most coveted hardwoods available.
Some people take delivery of picker loads from the local timber men, twenty of so sticks of mature leaders dropped by the side of the house where the homeowner has a chance to sharpen his chainsaw and splitting skills and save the premium for split wood delivered a cord at a time by dump trucks. The sound of Huskies and Stihls is a familiar one during the last few weeks of Summer and it lets you know that it’s almost over.
The calls start coming in around August and the early birds always ask the same question, “is it dry?” Fire wood is either green, seasoned or dry, with the last being the most desired and fetching a premium. Nothing is more frustrating than trying to heat a house when it’s ten below using green wood. It smokes, it hisses and crackles, it coats the chimney with creosote and it heats as efficiently as an oil lamp. Seasoned cord wood means that it was cut in one season to be burned in another, better than green, but not quite as good as dry.
Dry wood means that it was cut, blocked, split and dried in ricks for at least a year. For the really serious folks only standing dead wood will do. This is wood harvested from select trees that have died while rooted and air dried for years before harvest. There is little moisture left in these trees before they are split and next to nothing by the time they are fed into the wood stove. The old timers will actually ask for “deadwood oak” and pay a premium for it.
The key to heating with fire wood is to build the coal bank properly- first the tinder, usually split sticks of hemlock or pine ignited by sheets of white birch bark, then the kindling; white ash, poplar, easy to split with a hand ax and fast to catch fire. When the fire is good an hot the denser woods like oak and cherry, rock maple and apple are added until a bed of red hot coals fills the firebox and delivers a constant dry heat into the house, requiring minimal tending and only an occasional feeding of fresh logs.
There is plenty to be said for the convenience of an oil furnace and forced air heat, but they require expensive maintenance and ducts push dust and debris around the house and the cost of oil is never cheap. Wood heat is something special and the smell is comforting. It is easy to overlook where our warmth comes from when the only involvement we have is with a thermostat on a wall, but it is unforgettable when you use wood.
They say that if you chop your own wood it heats you twice- first when you cut it and next when you burn it. Whoever said that was one of the guys we deliver to. Wood heats you half a dozen times at least. When you timber the trees and limb them, when you load the stems to the yard, when you cut and block them, when you split and when you stack, when you load and deliver and when you finally burn them up, one piece at a time. Wood, as an agricultural product, is one of the most reliable outputs a farm has.
They say up here that New Hampshire wants to be a forest and it only takes a couple of years to learn that truth. Everywhere one can see the shadow of overgrown fields rapidly returning to second growth woods, the stone walls buried beneath the verdant cover of saplings and forbs. You cannot cut and split enough for your customers to satisfy their demand by the end of Winter if it is a hard one. The key to that of course is timing and location.
You can have enough on hand, but if there’s a hard snow getting it off the property when there’s two foot of cover on the stacks is another matter. Try as hard as we might, its impossible to get everyone to take delivery before the weather sets in. There is always the frantic call in March, right in the middle of sugaring when we least can afford to deliver a half cord, but do it anyway and the question at the end is always the same, “is it dry?”
Firewood is nothing more than stored energy awaiting release. If you think about the process, how the Sun plus the soil equals the tree, you realize the magic of the world. Energy pours forth and creates matter which in turn releases the energy. Summer in the midst of Winter, all contained in a block of wood. I feel more like a sorcerers apprentice at times than a farmer. I help control the chaos of Nature as it moves through it’s steady and seasonal course, but it is the inner workings of Nature itself, its mathematical proofs and physics experiments operating without surcease that create the wonderful act of transformation, of one thing into another and back again.
I used to live in the world without thinking much about it. I stood in front of the Great Pyramid of Cheops when I was a younger man and I probably accepted what was said about it and all pyramids for that matter, that they were temples or tombs, that they represented the kings and pharaohs, the potentates and poobahs of some distant past and were ceremonial in nature, but I think I understand them better now.
Everything we produce in surplus, from composted manure to feedstock, grains and firewood, hayricks and mulches are piled for storage around the farm, stored energy in the form of matter and from a distance each one appears like a pyramid. I think those civilizations and cultures of the past saw it too and if they worshiped anything it wasn’t men, it was Nature’s ability to magically transform one thing into another so that we might last through another year and begin again to prepare for the next. And it was to this magical truth that they built their monuments.
When I was 13, I moved to live with my dad in rural Oklahoma. This was 1984. Prior to that, I had lived with my mom, in an exclusively urban environment, raised as a latch-key kid with snacks and TV after school. I knew the TV schedule from 4:00 PM to 10:00 PM, every night of the week.
My dad would not tolerate a lazy child. There was always a list of chores to be done. And when I got done with chores and I needed something to do, I could always split wood. I remember it clearly, to this day. Splitting firewood was my training into the world of physical manual labor.
Dad worked in the construction industry and had contacts for various jobsites in Eastern Oklahoma where they cleared and grubbed the land before building. Red oak, white oak, hickory, cottonwood, I learned to identify them all. We’d take all the chainsaws, tools, lunch and a water cooler to whichever site dad had located and agreed to. We’d cut the fallen trees into long runs, long enough to fit onto a trailer. At 14, I learned to operate a backhoe, to drag the tree lengths to the trailer. Dad was responsible for getting the trunks onto the trailer.
When we loaded as much on the trailer as weight would allow, we’d haul the whole thing back home. Then, we trimmed the trunks into 18” pieces to fit into the fireplace. My job was to feed him the logs, and he’d lop them off into the short pieces. I’d roll the pieces out of the way, and we’d process the whole trailer that way. The, came the splitting.
My first tool was a homemade splitter, made from an old sledge hammer that he’d cut and grinded to a point. I broke dozens of wooden handles in the sledge hammer over the years. (Well, maybe not “dozens” but a bunch of them.) Eventually, I outgrew that and he bought me a “monster maul.” Basically, a huge triangle welded to a steel pipe. By the time I was a senior in high school, I could split wood as well as any man. I don’t know how many ricks of wood I split, but it was a bunch!
He’d stack the large pieces of tree trunk sections for me, and I’d swing the hammer. There was always a very satisfying sound feel when you connected with the wood in just the right way. If you missed just a little bit, and hit off-center or off-true, you could feel the jarring through your whole body. But when you hit that trunk just right, and the point of the maul buried into the wood just right, you could actually FEEL the fibers of the wood splitting. And once you had that first piece cracked, the rest of the log was easier to split after that. Eventually, they all gave up and lost. I split them all.
There’s nothing quite as satisfying as wood heat. Even on the coldest winter day, you can go outside in a raging blizzard, and look forward to getting back inside. Within minutes of being near the wood stove, you get warm all the way to your insides. Electric heat pumps and modern technology don’t hold a candle to an old-fashioned wood stove. After moving away from home, I’ve lived in a variety of suburban houses and apartments, but I long for the day when I can have wood heat again.
Now, having started a journey on the ideas of permaculture, I’m learning about rocket mass heaters and using small sticks through coppicing as a more efficient way of heating one’s home. Still, I’d like to see if I can still split wood.
HSF,
Beautifully said. Back in the 1970’s when oil became quite expensive, my brother installed a wood stove into my parents basement. He had an endless supply of hardwood from the pit that he worked in. He wood fill up his dump truck with 4′ to 6′ pieces and drop them at the edge of the driveway. Me and my other two brothers 12, 14 and 16 were to cut, hand split and stack the wood. Heavy work for a bunch of suburban teens, but then we were used to taking in 5 ton of hay for the goats each winter from Canada. Funny, chainsaws, axes, sledge hammers and wedges, yet no gloves, safety goggles, helmets and hearing protection. Somehow we all survived. I loved the smell of the wood burning in the house, the smell alone warmed you up. Time to get back on the roof and finish shingling the gable end of the house. Good day to all.
Bob.
would not wood my bad.
Love Hardscrabble’s informative post.
But I have a couple of nagging worries about burning wood for heat.
First is that it is really only good in a lightly-populated area with a lot of dense vegetation. God forbid we ever arrive at a point where it is the only heat/energy source for our country, which is 90% deforested and is carrying a swollen population of 310 million and counting. If a substantial fraction of our population were forced to revert to burning wood for heat, there would not be a single growing thing over 2′ tall left in the continental U.S, and we would have gangs roaming the country killing people for their wood furniture. It’s hard to turn a continent the size of North America into another Easter Island, but a population of 400 million plus between the 3 countries could do it.
Overpopulation and resource depletion are bitches, aren’t they?
Second consideration is the health hazard of burning biofuel in the house. Is there that much diff between wood smoke and the smoke of tobacco leaves? Burning biofuel indoors is one of the major causes, world wide, of respiratory illness.
Chicago999444, not understanding your 90% deforested. Maybe it’s time to get out of the city and look around.
Burning biofuel? Why not just say wood. I bet you wear a helmet riding your peddle bike.
Smart people know how to burn wood in their house and make sure the smoke goes outside. Maybe we can cull the population of the dumb people as they choke to death on biofuel fumes.
Going to investigate propane insert gas fireplaces this fall. Tired of all the hassles with obtaining wood, splitting, stacking, gathering starter sticks, cleaning ashes, etc. Love fireplaces and natural wood fires, but the convenience of gas at the flick of a switch and steady heat is calling me. Color me lazy.
Nice post, HSF.
Chicago999444, spoken like true urbanite.
We’ve been heating with wood for several decades on our farm and have never taken a live tree for fuel yet. Oaks, elms, ash and other hardwoods are in abundance here. We just wait for nature to sort them for us. The “premium” hardwoods we sell, but it has been my experience that any wood that has been dried properly will burn hot and long, even cottonwood. We typically burn cedar, hackberry, sycamore, catalpa and other woods considered less than premium. Sell the best, use the rest. When dry the secondary woods provide an incredible amount of heat.
It’s 95F here today and I’m headed out to cut firewood. My wife asked me why I was cutting wood today instead of doing the standard summer jobs like fencing or weeding. My response was that if I cut four cords this afternoon (with my “hydraulic helpers” of course) I could make upwards of $900.00. She told me to go cut wood.
In the short term, there will probably be much more demand for wood as the cost of heating oil goes up. A harsh winter is predicted, so all bets are off as to how high heating oil or propane will go this year. Long-term, who knows….As indicated in the post, there is nothing like wood heat to warm the bones after a cold day outside. And nothing like the old-fashioned, centrally located “massive and passive” wood heater that will never require electricity or other inputs to operate.
Am working on a wood-fired electric generator. Components are expensive and the conversion may not be the best, but wood is the one renewable fuel we are surrounded by. Note to self: start cutting more wood.
Chicago999444
I’m with you. I look at the pic of that rather large pile of wood (in Hardscrabble’s post), and I wonder what would happen if all of America’s 300+ million citizens heated their homes in such a manner. How long until all the trees are gone?
We had one home with a wood burning stove. We had 4 acres and over half was wooded, so we had a nice little supply. I did like the smell of burning wood, and it really was quite cozy, and kept the large basement pretty warm. So, I am not an anti-woody kind of guy.
But, my parent’s next door neighbor has a wood burning stove. Every fucking year … two, max … I have to power wash all the fucking soot off the house. I would tear down the neighbor’s chimney if I thought I could get away with it. Fuck wood!! lol
HEy HSF, Just wanted to say thanks again for that Back to Eden Garden link. I’ve adapted my plans here and have spread almost 40 yards of wood chips so far. I get home about 3:15 am and it was such a beautiful morning that I spread chips for a few hours in the (mostly) dark. I knew the chips were hot but when I stood back and looked at the pile it appeared as though I had a big volcano steaming in the driveway!
My soil is already pretty rich already but I have a feeling it’s about to get much better. My wife just planted a fall crop of lettuce.kale, spinach, cilantro and peas. Our puppy has been having a blast digging in the pile and lays around in the sun chewing on wood chips. She keeps dragging them into the house as well and looks rather indignant when we toss them back out.
I’m hoping we get a lighter winter.. and I saw something in our apt. building garden that gave me hope.
Bagged a beautiful wooly bear caterpillar while I was weeding, and it was PALE brown. I know it’s an “old wives'” thing,but I cling to hope. The old tale has it that dark wooly bears mean a harsh winter ahead, while pale ones mean a mild one.
First wooly bear I have seen for a long time. Have seen a few species of butterflies I haven’t seen for awhile, like the gorgeous Emperor (dark, with blue spots on the wings), but, sadly, no Monarchs. We usually get a lot of Monarchs flying through Chicago this time of year.
About the wood-burning stoves, it’s fine if you have an ample supply of wood, but the reason you do is because only a small fraction of the population uses wood for heat, so there’s an ample supply. Watch how fast that supply depletes, and wood fuel becomes EXTREMELY scarce, if fossil fuels and electricity (from whatever kind of generation) becomes so scarce and expensive that people everywhere start burning anything they can lay their paws on, to get warm. Rural dwellers better stand guard over their woodpiles with armored tanks and nukes, come that time. Consider: 300 years ago, North America was very heavily forested- all the land of IL was forest. What is now Chicago was a dense forest. And this country had, what, about 5 million people at the time of the Revolution in 1776? Now 90% of the forest is gone, replaced with cities, towns, monoculture farms, highways, slag heaps…. and 310 M people to keep fueled.
Those of you who rely on wood for fuel had better hope like hell that the rest of us don’t imitate you, and that we can always stay powered and warm without burning wood. You wouldn’t want the competition for your wood. I hope you always have it and I hope I can always get my heat from another source.
About 30 percent of the 2.3 billion acres of land area (745 million acres) in the U.S. is forest today as compared to about one-half in 1630 (1.0 billion acres). Some 300 million acres of forest land have been converted to other uses since 1630, predominantly because of agricultural uses in the East.
The forest resources of the U.S. have continued improving in general condition and quality, as measured by increased average size and volume of trees. This trend has been evident since the 1960s and before. The total forestland acreage has remained stable since 1900.
http://forestry.about.com/library/bl_us_forest_acre_trend.htm
Only 70% deforested, then.
Against a population of 310 million and growing.
Hmmmm… how long does it take to replenish forests? And how many cords of wood, would a family of 4 need to keep tolerably warm in a winter in CO, Chicago, or any other place 30 degrees north or futher?
Chicago
There were 1 billion acres of forest in 1630 and 745 million acres today. That is 25.5% less than four centuries ago. Please look at the chart. All of the deforestation happened before 1900. Forest acreage hasn’t changed at all since 1900.
Are you math challenged?
There are large tracts of the United States that require little or no heating beyond that required for domestic hot water, they likely will not draw down on the wood required to heat homes and businesses. Wood is a renewable resource while coal, fuel oil, and natural gas are not. Homes today are far more energy efficient than those built over a century ago. Wood burning stoves are far more efficient as well. The waste product of nuclear plants are lethal for centuries, ash improves soil ph thus increasing fertility. A single cord of firewood produces approximately 28 million btu’s at a cost of $250, for fuel oil, currently over $4 per gallon it would take over $1,000 to deliver an equal number of btu’s.
Of course the entire argument is moot because the vast majority of Americans have made their decision which they would prefer when it comes to spending their energy dollars. Just as there is little risk of people running off to become sustenance farmers, the same could be said of a wholesale reversion to firewood as a fuel source.
No, admin, but we did not have 310 M people then.
We’ve lived well without those forests thanks to the fantastic fossil fuel bounty. I suppose we can run for a while longer on coal after oil becomes to scarce and expensive, but even coal does not have the versatility and portability of oil, and we will be that much poorer without it.
How much poorer even so would we be, were we reliant upon wood for heat, never mind other energy-dependent activities? Wood has only 1/4 the energy density of coal. I haven’t dug up all the numbers, but it is easy to figure that if everyone now reliant upon natural gas and coal (which provides a substantial portion of our electricity) were to switch to wood, we would have a major energy deficit and we would chew through our forests far too quickly for them to regenerate.
Hardscrabble and others
I don’t mean to be argumentative. I certainly don’t have all the answers, or in-depth knowledge. Just making observations here.
Sure, trees are renewable. So, should we cut down all the Big Redwoods to make pretty picnic tables? Once all, or most, of the trees are cut down, they rarely come back.
The cedar forests of Lebanon enjoy the unique distinction as the oldest documented forests in history. The cedars were featured prominently in the earliest written records of the Sumerians dating from the third millennium BC. The Epic of Gilgamesh describes the cedar forests of Lebanon as being “one thousand leagues long and one thousand leagues wide”
There are about 50 or so verses in the Old Testament about “the cedars of Lebanon”. Let me highlight just two;
—-1) “The mountains were covered with its shadow, And the cedars of God with its boughs.”
………….. Psalms 80:10
—- 2) “Open your doors, O Lebanon, That a fire may feed on your cedars. Wail, O cypress, for the cedar has fallen, Because the glorious trees have been destroyed; Wail, O oaks of Bashan, For the impenetrable forest has come down.”
………….. Zechariah 11:1-2
Psalm 80 was written sometime around 1000 BC …. when the mountains of Lebanon were covered with cedars. Zechariah was written about 500 years later …. and by then the glorious trees have been mostly destroyed.
Twenty five hundred years later, the cedars are making somewhat of a comeback, thanks to the Lebanese government funding of forest preserves … but they will never again be “one thousand leagues long and one thousand leagues wide”
And let’s not forget Easter Island. The island was once covered with trees, end to end. More than a few historians believe the island’s demise was the result of deforestation.