Splitting Time

As I mentioned, the snow is receding and I'm able to access some of the wood to split. Last year I borrowed a splitter to split numerous logs that I couldn't do by hand, and it was pretty impressive how well that thing worked. Since some of the blocks were 2-3 years old, you can imagine that they wood was not in the best shape, and I probably should have just let them rot in the woods. Instead I split them and burned some of them this winter, and I think it was a mistake. The wood didn't burn that well, or it was not that efficient. There are probably creosote consequences to my decision, but hopefully nothing that can't be fixed this summer.

I guess my point is that now that I'm splitting wood that is not that old, it looks so much nicer. It's not as black and ugly, and burns much more cleanly. While I'm glad to have burned through that old stuff, I think it's better to have wood that isn't one step away from petrification. I'm sure my Mentor would agree. Part of the reason I let the wood go bad was because it was too knotty or big to split by hand, and when I finally obtained the splitter, I ended up splitting it big. Having the big pieces made it much easier to stack, but I've found that consequently, we burn through the pile much quicker. Maybe it's a good thing that we're going through the bad stuff, not that any wood is bad, right?

Now I'm making a conscious effort to split the blocks into smaller pieces, and it sure makes stacking more rigorous. It will dry and burn more efficiently, but it is definitely more work. Oh well, I knew the job wouldn't be easy when I signed on, and who wants to do things the easy way? Not me, that's for sure.

My goal, and it's an ambitious one as usual, is to have two years worth of wood split, stacked, and drying before June. The one constraint on this lofty goal is whether or not I actually have two year's worth of wood on hand. If I do, I will be so stoked, but I won't know until I actually do the work. I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to Hans Galldin for the pic.