12:43 pm - 60 degrees - lightly raining...
A wood-burning fireplace is one
of the simplest joys of the winter months. It’s also a lot of work.
For us, our wood burning
fireplace is currently our only source of heat, so falling, cutting, splitting
and stacking firewood is an important skill for us to know and do.
Tony does all the falling of
trees and cutting those logs into rounds.
Thankfully we live on many acres of wooded forest so we are able to
start at the source.
I help Tony with the splitting. Even when log rounds are small in diameter, it makes sense to split them. Splitting speeds along the drying process and improves the burning qualities.
And we all pitch in to do the
stacking.
Even though the ideal time to
cut firewood is in the late winter and early spring months (this allows for the
maximum drying time), we usually have so much going on, that we don’t get
around to cutting, splitting and stacking our firewood until the end of July,
beginning of August.
So firewood cutting for this
coming winter is underway. Tony spent
last weekend cutting this pile of logs...
...into this pile of
rounds.
