Our farmhouse has an oil furnace, but we've always tried to keep the thermostat at about 55 and tooled up the woodstoves to keep warm. Even during the five winters when Hank was off sailing in the Caribbean, I kept the wood fires burning, so this winter will be no exception, what with the price of oil.
Shortly after we bought the farm, we had a gypsy moth invasion. We cursed those winged gluttons when they destroyed every other forest oak on the property, but were thrilled when we discovered we had firewood "on the hoof" so to speak, pre-seasoned oak ready to burn.
If you're not cutting green wood, which needs to be seasoned for anywhere from three months (ash, beech, locust) to a year (some of the oaks and hickory), you can gather your winter wood supply in late fall. It's an ideal time - other fall chores are completed and there are no bugs in the woods. Felling dead trees, lopping off their side limbs, loading them behind the tractor in 8 to 10 foot lengths and bringing them home to stack in a bay of the long shed has been our usual November routine, accumulating four or five cords before the snows arrive.
Hank made a long sawhorse with side supports so three or four poles could be cut all at once into stove lengths with the chainsaw. This step is spread all through the winter. Any sunny day, an hour or so at the sawhorse, well out of the wind, provides enough cut wood to keep the stoves tooled up. Tossed into the garden cart, it's brought down and stacked on the front porch, usually haphazardly, but sometimes, if we're expecting company, as tidily as rolls of wallpaper in the hardware store.
When all that dead oak ran out, we tackled the dead elm, whose tall skeletons, festooned with scarlet woodbine each fall, lined our hedgerows. The woodpeckers, avidly searching for insects, had removed the bark, allowing the dead trunks to dry out without turning punky, so they made good firewood. Elm is almost impossible to split as its grain is very twisted, so we'd saw the logs too fat for the stove into 8 inch lengths. We called them "all-nighters" and saved them to use at bedtime. Elm provides only 20 million BTUs (British thermal units) per cord, about a million less than oak, and burns up fast, but the chunky "all nighters" would last until breakfast.
Over the years, Hank cut down a great many unwanted trees from our pastures, piling them up behind the knoll. Here he is, proudly standing in his woodlot.
All that wood is well-seasoned now, and my son-in-law, John, has already brought a couple of dozen 8-footers down to the long shed for me. Now that my other fall chores are done, even the leaf-raking, I have begun cutting them into stove lengths. I have an electric chainsaw that John sharpened and it cuts like a hot knife through butter.
Everyone knows that wood you cut yourself warms you twice. It's also good exercise. And there's a bit of additional exercise washing smoky windows, emptying the ashes every week and spreading them on the raspberry and the asparagus beds. But the best thing about burning wood is what it does to the oil bill.
