Assessing the Firewood Effort

Other than a bit of shifting and filling, the firewood shed is full for the coming winter. I’m feeling really great about this, particularly since we have so much extra wood harvested, in the round if not cut and stacked to dry. All of it, at this time, is dry enough to burn. The majority is bone dry!

The last felled tree is now fully accounted for, either in ready-to-burn form, or in rounds and double rounds stashed about the homestead.

Such a significant accomplishment seems to deserve a bit of analysis, for what it’s worth . . . :

The wood shed holds, according to Aly’s calculations, about 4.5 cords of wood. This is a bit more than one severe winter’s worth of wood (this contradicts an assertion I made last autumn—what the hell was I thinking?).

To my best guess, this year’s pile consists of 12-15 trees, roughly from 4 to 16 inches in diameter.

The major push to fill the wood shed took approximately 2 months of work, approximately 5 days a week, 4-6 hours each day.

Backpack loads of rounds vary widely, but probably averaged 50 pounds. The last tree required about 10 trips down the hill.

I will continue to work on the shed pile. I need to make sure the snorkel vent for the battery bank has adequate airflow—I can’t pack the wood in around it too tightly. I also see a lot of places that can be filled in with smaller pieces. The more spaces I fill, the less likely it’ll be a squirrel condo this winter. Besides, as I say, I have a lot of extra wood to work with, and it all needs to get undercover somewhere before winter.

I’ll continue to harvest wood from the forest, although at a greatly reduced pace. At the far end of our property, a few blow downs are ready to be processed. I intend to cut them into double round lengths and store them till winter, when we’ll hopefully have enough snow to sled them to the homestead.

On the whole, though, we’ve completed a major summer job, and ensured heat security for the coming winter and beyond. That’s a great feeling!

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