firewood | tworockchronicles

Ibuprofen Monday

A.V. Walters

Spring Peeking Through

It was a glorious weekend. Temperatures in the 60s and sunshine! Almost all of the snow is gone—except in a few spots in the shade (north facing slopes) or where Rick piled it with the blower during the winter.

There are a thousand things we should be doing. But the ground is not yet thawed, and … well, we rationalized why the highest and best use of our time would be to open up the trails to the “back forty.” The property has a slightly graded panhandle (for road access) and then a chunk of steep hills and valleys leading to an upper meadow. On foot, it’s a heavy breathing hike. Until now, we’ve only been able to access it with a vehicle by going on an old logging road through the neighbors’ back yard. The neighbors have been good about it, but not enthusiastic. So, really it was about getting access and keeping good neighborly relations. It had nothing to do with the outrageous weather.

We need the access because back there is where we harvest the deadfall for our firewood heating supply. The hills are heavily forested and, especially with the Emerald Ash Borer losses, they are littered with standing and dropped dead trees.

This ash is doomed. Pileated woodpeckers have chipped off the bark surface to get at the borers, below.

It breaks our hearts, to see these dead any dying trees but we’d be fools to let the wood go to waste. The property is criss-crossed with old (and pretty steep) logging roads, many of them blocked with fallen trees. The weekend would be a trail clearing exercise. It was not to be a harvesting foray.

It started like this, just to clear the trail:

But one thing led to another…and there was this:

And then, when we made it over the ridge and down the trail on the Kubota, we could hardly contain ourselves. So there was this:

And then, a couple of stragglers on the way home yielded this:

We are agog over how much safer and easier the firewood harvest can be with Kubota assist. You can chain lift logs for safer sawing access, or just drag them down the slopes to cut where there’s no danger of rolling. Even with that, it’s heavy work. We came home each night achy and sweaty, but elated. We’re naming the “new roads” as we open them up.

Believe it or not, that’s the “road.”

The woods are lovely this early in the year. There’s the carpet of leaves, and just the tips of the wild leeks and Dutchman’s Breeches peeking through.

There’s only one hitch. Now there’s no doubt that we need a little trailer. Our lovely circuitous trails can get us in to make wood—but that’s where the wood will stay until we can wrangle a trailer in. It’s too much wood to try to remove with just the loader.

And like many in the Midwest, after the first incredible weekend of spring, we’re stiff and sore.

Observing the New Year

A.V. Walters

There must be near as many ways to bring in the New Year as there are people. My mother thinks it’s bad luck to start the year with any of her ironing left undone. That’s not a problem for me. My current life style doesn’t include ironing. I don’t even know where my iron is—somewhere in storage, I hope. My sister’s New Year superstition is about what you can eat on New Year’s Day. No poultry for her. (Apparently, if you eat chicken, or birds that scratch, you’ll spend the entire year scratching for a living.) She hasn’t indicated whether or not that eliminates eggs for breakfast. What does that say about pork? After all, pigs root around for food. Does that bode ill for the traditional New Year’s ham? (or bacon with those questionable eggs?)

I don’t do resolutions, either. Sure, I could lose a little weight, or be more regular in my sleep habits. I’ve already cut way back on sugar. I figure if there’s improving that needs doing, one ought not wait for the New Year over it.

I’m not one much for observing holidays, except Thanksgiving, which I like so much that some years I celebrate it twice—Canadian and American. I do like to have all the laundry done, not because of my mother, but it seems a shame to bring last year’s dirty laundry into the New Year. So, I guess my New Year’s observance includes tidying up a bit. We don’t go out. We don’t watch any “balls drop” on television. That would be boring and impossible, since we don’t have a television. Yesterday, though, we took the tidying to a new level.

We’ve been gathering wood. We won’t need it this winter, since we’re behind in the building schedule and the house isn’t ready. But we’ve been cutting, hauling and splitting deadfall off and on since the summer. It’s been piling up, waiting to be stacked. So we decided to finish splitting what we have and to stack it all as a fitting close for 2014. It was easier said than done.

We estimate that we’ll need four cords of wood to heat for winter. My sister uses just over five, but hers is a much bigger house—and three hundred miles north of us. They get a longer, colder season. We don’t keep the house as warm as some do—65 degrees is about as warm as we can stand. We figure that we have about four cords cut now—though we’ll know for sure by the end of the day. Yesterday we stacked two cords, snug up against the cord I stacked this past summer.

The aim is to have two year’s worth of wood cut and stacked. That way it’ll “season,” which just means that it’ll get good and dry for a clean, long burn. My sister (the show off) is working on being three years ahead. We’re continuing to clean up the deadfall in the forest through the winter and, as long as the snow doesn’t get too deep, we’ll likely have our two year supply cut and stacked by spring. When we start the “regular” firewood season, next fall, we’ll be working on three years, too. I’d feel pretty smug about that. A good store of firewood, now that is rich.

When I was a kid, my dad made me stack wood crisscrossed, the old way—so that it would be stable. I started like that for the first cord. I suppose that it’s the best way but it takes me forever. I get caught up in it and spend forever selecting the perfect piece to go in each spot. Rick rolls his eyes. So yesterday we started the day at our local hardware store, picking up some metal fence posts to hammer in at the end of the stacked rows. That way I can just stack without getting too finicky. We store our firewood stacked on wooden pallets and then tarped to keep it dry. At some point we’ll build a woodshed—after the rest of the house, and the pole barn, and the chicken coop, and the…, well, you get the point.

It took forever today to stack two cords. The wood pile has been a loose trip hazard, logs just tossed over after splitting. Part of it was covered, but we ran out of tarps during October’s constant rains, so as the pile grew, a good bit of it was open to the elements. It rained over Christmas, while we were away, and then the temperature dropped. By the time we were ready to move the pile and stack—much of it was frozen in place. It looked fine but when you tried to pick it up, it wouldn’t budge. So we had to first break it up with the sledge. Two steps forward, one step back. In the future, I’ll try to stack after splitting. (That’s a common sense plan, not a resolution.) And with that, we should ring in the New Year, just fine.