Wood Worries

Every couple days, we move more wood from the piles to the porch.

Our activities for the past few days have focused on staying warm, which means many hours lingering and reading in the loft, but also hours tending to the wood stove, restocking the woodpile on the front porch and wondering if we cut enough wood to make it to spring. All we can really do is wait and see. If we run short, plenty of dead stuff is lying around our 5 acres. It won’t burn as nicely as the red oak that warms us now, but it’ll do.

After this pile is gone, we have just four left. Gulp.

This winter isn’t colder than those past, but it seems we’ve had a longer stretch of particularly cold days. The wood stove finally got a break yesterday, when we hit a sunny 46 and we let the stove go cold while we headed out into our woods to start the Great Firewood Hunt for Winter 2018-2019. We took down a 75-footer; we thought it was oak, but now we're not certain. But it's a hardwood, so come next winter, it'll burn nicely! But today, we’re back inside by the fire. We hit a high of 35 before noon and now, just a few hours later, it’s 29 and snowing.

The 75-foot tree we felled yesterday fell off its stump but then got hung up in other trees. That's Mason contemplating how we we're going to get it down to the ground. We ended up tying a steel cable to it and another big tree to the right and used a "come-along" to tighten the cable, eventually clearing the tangled tree and bringing it crashing down to the forest floor. We then spent nearly three hours cutting it all up. Yes, we're sore today.

So far our road repairs and new gravel are holding up nicely.