wood – Ben's Blog

First Fire & Peaches

ben — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 03:42:07 +0000

An August rainy day is a usual time for a first fire of the season. July is really the only month without fires although they are few and far between in the surrounding months. This one is more significant in that it the first time we fire the new SweetHeart, in the new almost finished kitchen. I remember clearly the first time we fired the previous cookstove. They are so important to us it’s a big deal to be introduced to a new one.

The cats knew where to be

Since it’s a better/newer version of our previous cookstove, we thought it’d likely behave the same, and reassuringly it did. It’s nice to not start from scratch. Stoves all have their personalities and we’ve learned about our previous one for 11 years. The water tank this one has would have been so nice to have when we were getting all our hot water from the stove. We moved a lot of hot water in pots by hand. It feels like a lifetime ago even though we were still doing so last Winter. It’s incredible how fast one gets used to luxuries. The oven is a bit differently shaped, non-ideally really so we’re going to have to figure something out.

Since the fire was going Nicole cooked everything under the Sun. Starting with preserving a bunch of peaches our tiny trees produced. We actually removed all the buds from them in the Spring so the trees would spend their energy on growing rather than making fruits, but there were so many we missed a lot of them. One day I saw a deer go at the trees which made me realize a lot of good peaches had gone under the radar and were now ready. Thank you I guess?

10 frozen bags and 22 preserves, not bad for a couple of tiny trees which weren’t supposed to do anything.

Mean Lean Milling Machine

ben — Mon, 04 May 2026 01:33:04 +0000

I started going through the massive amount of oak that was dropped in my driveway last Winter. It’s fun and fast.

Everything is massive with this oak. I excised some of the cool knots, not sure if I’ll ever do something with them but I figure they might be cool in some project. They need to dry a few years first so now’s not the time to think of what that could be.

Beyond the knots, we thought it’d be kind of a shame not to get a few boards out of such a special tree. It’s oak, it really stood out as a tree, it’s close to 200 years old, and we walked past it for 10 of them. So after researching possibilities, I bought a chainsaw mill with a 24″ bar and a ripping chain. The saw is a monster when fully equipped.

I haven’t taken it on its maiden ripping yet, all in due time. And now I’m dreaming of going deeper in the woods and building a cabin with lumber milled on the spot.

The Deader the Better

ben — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 22:52:00 +0000

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.

Stove Life

ben — Wed, 25 Feb 2026 23:01:16 +0000

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

ben — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 02:32:29 +0000

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.

Sweetheart Rebrick

ben — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 01:45:11 +0000

The Sweetheart is due for a rebrick after 10 years of service. Luckily I can still find parts to replace the grate.

I Need a Word

ben — Tue, 12 Aug 2025 01:32:55 +0000

Only half of the work is done having felled a tree, or when nature makes a choice for you as pictured bellow. Then begins the careful process of bringing it all down on the ground. It takes careful reading of limbs, tension points, and interactions, to make safe cuts. I’ve improved this skill over the years and will work through a tree with accurate anticipation of what movement a cut will yield. The delivery of the cut can also make a difference. I’m not aware of a word to describe this process of reading a tree and releasing it fully from suspension.

The heavy root system will pull the trunk back upright suddenly past a certain point.

Protected: It’s Been Wet

ben — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 01:04:23 +0000

Flames from Above

ben — Tue, 31 Dec 2024 04:12:44 +0000

The new stove does this cool thing when you engage the secondary combustion where the flames comes from the top rather than the logs at the bottom. It’s totally weird and I’m glad they gave us a heads up about it.

Fairy House

ben — Wed, 29 May 2024 00:27:37 +0000

Esther loves creating Fairy houses, and I love creating wood piles.

Scored Some Woodchips

ben — Thu, 15 Feb 2024 02:18:05 +0000

It’s not unusual in Vermont to find a crew removing trees getting in the way of one thing or another. Often times they are contracted out do clean up whole roads and will be working for several days. Often times too, they need to drive a while to get rid of the resulting chips, which to us are gold. We can use them as green matter in compost, to keep weeds from growing while giving nutrients to the soil, or at worst as fill. We never have enough and so whenever we see these crews working, we ask if we can get some chips. Sometimes it saves them time so they’re happy to, and we slip them a twenty whenever we see them. We’ve gotten 3 big loads so far this year, right in time for Spring planting. It’s a really awesome win win.

The Cat’s Meow

ben — Sun, 21 Jan 2024 21:48:34 +0000

We bought another woodstove to replace the Alpiner. We keep hearing about how we could burn so much less wood with a more efficient stove, and it’s hard to understand, a log burnt is a log burnt. Why would it make more heat in another stove? Well apparently it does, and I’m not yet convinced of it, but this new stove is riddled with soapstone so at least it’s better at spreading out the release of heat over time. In the very few mornings we’ve had with it, it’s true that it was really easy to get the fire going again with just a few embers. Everything else is… well, like any other stove, we need to get acquainted with it.

The first fire, which sounds great except it’s off gassing so it stinks up the house. It does seem to be a well thought out, modern stove.

It is the first time we have a stove with a window. That aspect is really super nice, there’s nothing like the glow of a fire warming up a room.

Now I can barely move the Alpiner by myself, and the new stove (it doesn’t have a name yet), well it weights 2 to 3 times more… We had it installed thanks to tax incentives, and boy am I glad I didn’t have to move it. I don’t think I fully fathomed just how heavy it is.

It was nice to geek out with a couple of stove guys, and to make sure I wasn’t doing anything stupid since I never had someone official review my stoves and flue builds.

The Alpiner is waiting on the porch for next Spring to be moved to storage with the tractor. It’ll be useful in a cabin or other down the road. I gave it a thick coat of olive oil to prevent rust. It’ll burn off next time we fire it.

Tree Stump Art

ben — Mon, 08 Jan 2024 03:30:45 +0000

I always leave a little something in the stumps of the trees I take. It can’t be too complicated, and curves are reeeeeally hard. They’re all over the place and the kids love finding them, I hope the grand kids will too.

The Stove Fairy

ben — Mon, 10 Jul 2023 02:22:58 +0000

Every year, one rainy Summer day the flues and the stoves undergo a deep cleaning. A rainy day is perfect because I can’t do much else and the soot is kept down when I work on the pipes outside. This year Esther was interested, and even though it’s VERY messy work I involved her. She did great and we had a discussion about how she’d be able to maintain her stove in her cabin. Music to my ears. I like that this is a default for her, she might not even have the concept of a house without a stove.

I remove the stove pipe, to clean up the inside all the way out the roof. It’s messy even with great efforts to catch it all.

The pipes hooked to the stove are taken outside to be cleaned. Ben’s pro tip: mark the pipes with chalk where you’re separating them, it makes it easier to line them back up.

We go through all the insides of the stove and clean up accumulated ash. The first firing of the year is usually very hot because no ash is there to provide insulation.

We move very slowly to keep flying ash particles to a minimum.

Everything gets scrubbed six ways to Sunday, first with soap, then with baking soda, followed by much rinsing. We cook on the stove for most of the year, it needs it. When it’s all clean we protect the iron with stove paste, I’m not sure what it does to protect it but you can definitely feel some patches soak up more paste than other. I’d do it just because it makes the stove beautiful.

Esther has lots of very good practical question these days, she understands how a stove works now. Apparently I’ll still be the one sweeping her cabin’s chimney.

We still love burning wood with no end in sight. This stove is the most important thing in the house and I take pleasure in giving it its ritualistic pampering.

Oopsie

ben — Mon, 19 Jun 2023 01:17:13 +0000

The oak went exactly where I wanted, but I misestimated its height. I should be able to patch the shed back up.

Protected: Practicing her Balance

ben — Sun, 09 Apr 2023 20:08:40 +0000

Whole New World

ben — Mon, 19 Sep 2022 00:39:22 +0000

I’ve been using our newly earned trail access to get some fire wood. There’s just a ton of really good downed trees, ready to be picked. The few times we hiked up there I’d see them all and be bummed I couldn’t get to them. I feel like I’m logging in a whole new place, everything is different. the trees, the topology, being more remote, the feeling of the forest. I just walk around and start sawing where the heart tells me, it’s awesome. No real decision to be made.

How about a nice pre-felled maple?

This one was actually a bit far from the trail, but thanks to the magic of gravity, I didn’t have to carry logs the whole way.

All this awesome potential, now within reach, I can’t wait to go back.

Protected: No Need for Railing

ben — Sun, 18 Sep 2022 01:43:59 +0000

A Better Shot of the Pot Belly Beauty

ben — Mon, 14 Mar 2022 01:08:29 +0000

Absolutely gorgeous, it’s a shame it will have to wait some for restoration. The sugarhouse is full of stoves now :|.

Stove Addiction

ben — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 02:41:33 +0000

$50 for a pot belly stove that has been sitting in the Tunbridge Store for god knows how many decades. We don’t know much about its history but it does look like it has lived :). This one was simply too beautiful to pass even though it doesn’t look like much thrown in the truck like this. I don’t know if I will be able to get it up and running again. But we figure even dismantled, the parts will be beautiful decorations once brushed up. I would prefer to keep it functioning if at all possible.

This will be the last new stove for a good long while. We have nowhere to store another one anyway. I need to work on the couple of fixer uppers we have lined up first.

Protected: Firewood Storage

ben — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 01:59:07 +0000

2021 Wood Pile Art

ben — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 01:28:51 +0000

I tried a Log & Maul this time

Glenwoods side by side

ben — Sat, 27 Nov 2021 01:26:17 +0000

I compared the stoves a little closer to make sure the pieces would fit between each other. I was able to confirm that this new find is an absolute score. What luck to find it, it’s going to save me time, money, and the result will be a thousand times better. And we’ll have some spare parts if we need them.

My main piece of concern was the top of the oven box, where strong fires can eat at the iron over time. You can see all the cracks and other weak areas on the top piece, but the same piece in the new stove is in perfect shape!

In that same region where fires burn hottest, the frame supporting cook lids had been eaten at. Once again, the new part is perfect.

The 2 siblings side by side, one is a model C, the other a model C-H. I cannot figure out what that could possibly mean, but the C seems to have more than the C-H.

Ash removal from the bottom of the burn chamber, a very common configuration.

Ash removal from the side.

There’s a lot more odd parts here and there that will nicely merge to make a complete cook stove.

All parts have dates ranging from 1904 to 1917, I’m not sure why that is. I do wonder if they were cast at different years and then assembled together. If that’s true I’m not sure what the date of assembly is. There’s still a lot of unknown about this stove, possibly a lot that will never be known again.