Managing the wood pile
I
got a bit spoiled for the first month of the princess's reign. We
filled
up the wood shed at
the end of last winter with a lot of scavenged wood off the property
and with some cherry that Joey delivered, and the bone dry wood burned
beautifully. The shed was still two thirds full at the beginning
of the week, but we hit a snag --- most of the scavenged wood was too
punky to burn well. Instead, it seemed to dissolve in the fire,
producing very little heat.
Since the wood shed has
three rows of wood in it, my original plan had been to empty a third,
fill it with wood that had been sitting out in the elements, and cycle
through the other old wood so that by the time we got back to the new
third the wood was bone dry. Our efficient
wood stove uses so
little wood that I figured we'd have perhaps a month or two between
putting the wood in the shed and burning it, which would be plenty of
time for the winter snow to melt off it and for the 
wood
to dry back up.
The punky wood nixed
that plan. Instead, this week I've been burning wood that's only
been in the shed for a week or two, and the result has been slightly
cooler fires and actual smoke coming out the chimney. (Granted,
the smoke is all white, which means it's primarily water vapor, but I
still don't like it.) Although there's no remedy in the short
run, I went ahead and pulled all of the punky wood out of the shed so
that I can replace it with 
good
wood and have dry firewood at least by February.
Live and learn!
Now I have a better eyeball estimate of what kind of wood is too rotten
for firewood, and I also have a bunch of punky wood that I already put
to use in the garden. Stay tuned to see how....
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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