Out to the Woodshed - A Story of Firewood

    Who doesn't love a nice fire on a cold winter's day?  It's all cosy and warm and pretty.  And firewood and fire making are, like many things, more interesting and more complex when you really attend to them.  

    We've learned a lot about fires and firewood over the years, and though we can't heat this house entirely with wood - it was never heated that way, even when it was built in 1896 - we keep a fire burning in the front parlor every day, all day, during the cold season, and it heats most of the main floor during the day so that the furnace rarely gets going until the middle of the night.  

In addition, we fire up Milly, the wood cookstove, on the weekends, and the occasional weekday if I have time to get her going while working, to cook with as well as heat the rear of the house.  I'll provide a tour of Milly in another post.  She's a wonderful stove.

    The most obvious thing about wood stoves is, naturally, wood.  At our house, that means lots of wood.  We bought six cords of it last fall and are working our way through it steadily.  If six cords seems like a lot, I know folks who use twice that much, but they heat their entire house, including hot water, with that amount of wood.  They also have one of those large, outdoor furnaces that eat wood like a kid in a candy shop, but they do the job.  

   Fetching wood in mid-winter from under a tarp that has a layer of ice half an inch thick or six inches of snow on top is not a pleasant task, so last February on a cold and soggy day, I went to see Bill Miller, a local Amish lumberman, about a woodshed. I had first met Bill when I needed to have a chicken coop built, and he later made the hand-sawn oak planks for the floor of the new kitchen when we remodeled it and added Milly, the wood cookstove.  Over the past few years, I've become something of a regular with Bill, and we have talked about the relative merits of different models of wood stoves, how to get rid of creosote, and raising chickens. I think he's amused by this peculiar English woman who shows up in Victorian work dresses to discuss another project with him.  He's always very kind, but I can see a twinkle in his eye and a subtle grin on his face when he sees me jumping out of the van.  I suspect I may be a topic of conversation at the dinner table that evening.

    In addition to running his sawmill and lumber yard, Bill also sells pre-fab sheds in various sizes,  and because we want to support his business, and we definitely needed a woodshed, we bought one from him with the proceeds from our stimulus check:  an 8 x10 shed, painted to match the chicken coop, which would hold four cords of wood.  On a sweltering day in late summer last year, the shed arrived and was placed with due ceremony on the concrete pad where the previous owners had parked their RV.

    As the weather began to turn toward autumn, we started buying wood, two cords at a time, and loading it into the shed.  It takes a remarkably long time to fill an 8 x 10 woodshed, especially if you need to stop every few days due to rain. 

    If you're going to make heating with wood workable when it's really cold and snowy outside, the wood can't be just piled in the shed any old way.  We stacked the wood in layers, from the back to the front, as high as we could reach but not so high that logs would come tumbling down on our heads.  This was the point at which Harvest and I fervently wished we were taller so that we could stack more in.  Within each layer, there had to be a mix of different sizes of wood - really large pieces for the "overnight" logs in the parlor stove, and smaller, shorter pieces to fire up Milly.  We tossed the fist-sized chunks which arrived with every load into plastic garbage cans to save for kindling, and we took the skinny pieces into the basement as fire starters, piling them into two neat stacks just at the bottom of the stairs.   If it was burnable, we kept it.  We worked on it, one layer at a time, for what seemed like ages.  The shed held just a little under four cords, and we stacked the last two cords on the existing wood racks behind the shed. 

    For those who are not familiar with what a cord of wood means, there are three "faces" to a cord.  Each face is eight feet long and four feet high.  The logs can be any length, but 16 - 18 inches is about standard.  If you buy a full-sized wood rack, that rack will hold a face cord.  Three racks like that will give you a full cord of wood.  Three racks per cord times six cords of wood is 18 racks worth of wood - a lot of racks - so a shed was inevitable.  

    By the way, I don't recommend that you buy your wood from one of those posh sellers in the city.  Find someone who has a tree service and inquire there first.  They can often provide you with hardwood, which is what you want, for considerably less than a fancy wood seller, and they will often deliver it free or for a nominal fee.

    

After the shed was filled, we went hunting for birch bark and pine cones. 

Birch bark is an amazing substance.  It burns even when it's wet, and it's a fantastic fire starter.  A strip or two of birch bark underneath your kindling will catch fire quickly and burn hot and fast with a menacing sizzle.  I particularly like it for firing up Milly since she has a small firebox and can be a bit temperamental.  She doesn't like to be stuffed with paper, but she'll fire up just fine with some strips of birch bark under the kindling.

    You can find lots of birches in the woods around here and just peel the bark off  dead branches and downed tree trunks (never peel it from a living tree).  Peeling the bark off a branch is  quite satisfying, sort of like unwinding a toilet paper core or one of those Pillsbury biscuit tubes.  It's light, so you can collect a lot of it, and it's quite tolerant of being squashed.  And who doesn't like a tramp in the woods on a nice fall day?  It's a great excuse to get out for a little exercise and fresh air.  We tossed our birch bark hoard into a tin washtub next to the kindling stacks in the basement.  

    Pine cones are another great fire starter, though they are somewhat slower to catch fire and require something underneath them like newspaper.  They burn less fiercely than the birch bark, but they last longer  The two in combination are a winner, and gathering them is an excuse for another excursion into the woods.    

    Harvest goes one better with the pine cones and finds old wax candles by the pound at a local thrift store.  She melts them down, ladles the hot wax into a small muffin tin, adds a pinecone as a wick, and she has a long burning fire starter.  These are the sort of things you find around the winter holidays and pay handsomely for.  You can make them yourself for pennies.  

    Lastly, there is a technique for building a fire just like there's a technique for stacking wood.  Each stove or fireplace will be a little different, but the basic principle is to make sure there's enough air for the fire to burn and catch the wood.  If you don't give it air, all you'll achieve is a smoky, smoldering mess that will use up an entire newspaper and half a box of matches to get going.  

    Harvest lights our parlor stove every morning.  Here's how she does it:  

    First, she lays two pieces of kindling lengthwise in the stove - one at the back and one at the front.  She then builds a nest of newspapers between them and adds a couple of pine cones and maybe a wax fire starter in the middle.  

    She then puts another layer of wood at an angle to the kindling layer and then one last  layer of wood lengthwise on top, leaving plenty of room for air circulation between the layers and making sure that the wood is not too large.  The heavier logs can be added later when the fire is good and hot.    

    Strike a match, touch it to the paper and hey, presto!  A nice, roaring fire in  moments.  

    I used to be the fire builder in the house, but since she's learned to do it, Harvest has become She Who Lights the Parlor Stove, and I am now relegated to She Who Maintains the Fire.  Harvest has been quite put out with me when I've let the fire burn down to the point where a new log won't catch properly when it's added and the bellows must be used to get it to light.    I'm the one who puts the last log on at night, the bigger the better, and lowers the draft so that the wood doesn't burn too fast.  To be fair, though, I am She Who Lights the Wood Cookstove, and Harvest will bring me wood to do it, but she finds lighting Milly much too fussy for her taste.  Balance in all things.

    Since we have now cleared away the old wood racks which were next to the new wood shed, we have decided that we need to replace the racks with another, smaller shed to hold those last two cords of wood.  Just imagine, six cords of wood in two woodsheds, under cover and dry, with no tarps to wrangle around in the snow.  Sheer heaven.  

    And Bill Miller will have another chance to sell us a shed and to sit around his dinner table and talk about me again.   It's a win-win.