The wood piles are reaching their ends so it’s time to supplement them with dead (dry) stuff from the forest. We’ve gone through a lot of wood this Winter.
The Deader the Better
Stove Life
We don’t need another stove but we also couldn’t let this one pass. It’s our same Heartland SweetHeart we know really well from a decade of intense use, with a water tank, extra bells and whistles, a few decades newer, and for a good price. Since this is very much a key piece of our household, an upgrade even small goes a long way.
These things are heavy.
Extra Christmas
The town’s been wanting to remove an oak that is rotting and is just enough on the road that they hit it with the plow sometimes. It’s a family favorite as it’s on a dirt road we often walk on, and it’s absolutely massive. It has 3 enormous trunks, and each trunk has several branches the size of the trees I usually take. It’s next to a power line, rotted and far bigger than anything I can reasonably tackle. Let’s just say I’ve been excited when I heard about their plan to drop it. In Vermont when a town or utility needs to clear trees, the landowners get to call dibs. That was a year ago and I thought maybe they had forgotten about it. And so one day, I hear some chainsawing in the distance, and when this happens, I usually follow the noise to make sure no one is poaching my trees, and because I like to chat with neighbors. To my surprise a whole crew is there, 7 guys with heavy equipment going at the big oak. In a very typical Vermont interaction I get to meet the road foreman, and I tell him I’m definitely keeping the tree. He was aware, the information wasn’t lost in the year it took for the gears to get in motion.
I tell him he’s welcome to leave it over the bank for me to come grab, to which he responds he’ll drop it in my driveway if I prefer… Yes sir, I very much prefer not moving several tons of tree by myself :). And that’s how 31 nice big chunks of oak showed up in my driveway. I didn’t have to lift a finger, and I got to enjoy a good show (watching pros and heavy machinery at work). It’s Christmas all over again.
Some chunks are massive, and there is still a very full day’s worth of work left behind in the woods. All in all there’s probably 2 years worth of firewood. But maybe some of it is worth milling, we’ll see.
