Next Year's Firewood

This past May we had a tree fall on our house, we were standing right there as it happened...kind of scary. Lucky for us insurance more than covered the repair cost and I was able to fix the roof myself. So this week we took out seven large trees, two of which were totally dead and the other four had dead tops, as a preventative measure. Guess that takes care of next year's firewood...and then some. This will spare us and our poor old truck the challenge of driving winding mountain roads next spring in our annual trek for firewood. Always nice to be one step ahead of the game.

The tree I'm cutting on in this photo is a Grand Fir, Native Americans used the inner bark of this tree for treating colds and fever...interesting.

A Very Busy May

Of late, we are often found working outside of the house from early morning till dark and truly enjoying every last minute of it. Unfortunately, tending to the numerous duties required if one is to attempt to live a "simple" life makes it pretty darn hard to keep up with blogging...but it is raining today, so I find myself with a bit of spare time this afternoon. We have been very busy with gardening, working on our long term goal of "financial self-sufficiency," and various other projects including gathering firewood in our spare time.

My wife, the dog, our old Ford pickup and I have to make about a 30 mile round trip, give or take a few miles, when we gather firewood. It doesn't sound like that far until you take into account that half of those miles are on heavily rutted winding mountain roads where the un-posted maximum speed is between 5-10 mph. On a good day we can cut and load over a cord of wood into our poor overloaded truck in about 4 hours, snake our way back down the mountain and be home before noon. This has been a great year for firewood as windstorms have blown over so many trees. That said, our goal is to take advantage of this and stockpile a couple years worth of wood.

And to think in days gone by, while living a much different lifestyle, I used to go to the gym and lift weights for exercise...silly me.

I love cutting wood, splitting wood, and heating with wood. I might have been a logger in another life, there is just something about the sound of a saw and the smell of freshly split wood that brings a smile to my face...even on the days that I forget to bring the chainsaw gasoline and have the nasty taste of fuel in my mouth all day from siphoning it out of the truck...yuck.

For an excellent total body workout try hauling just over a cord of wood uphill, by hand. Good clean fun, I like to tell Mrs. H, although at times I think she might not agree.

The best part of a day spent cutting and splitting wood and tending to all the necessary tasks that are involved in ones life when they attempt to live by their own hand is the utter exhaustion that comes at the end of each day. We eat good and sleep good....every day.

Last night we had with our meal the best loaf of bread, my new favorite, and so very easy to make in a snap. You can find a link to this most wonderful and Perfect German Bread at the Metamorphosis blog site. Thanks Silke! We loved it so much.:)


What else?

The garden is finally starting to grow, albeit very slowly as this has been an abnormally chilly spring with record breaking cold and frost. I don't have any pictures but will do a garden update soon. Also, my wife has recently completed her third race, a half marathon. I'm very proud of her and she did great, having advanced quite a bit from the previous year. I'm also very glad it is over so we can finally get back to our shorter more enjoyable runs.

Rowdy, the wonder dog, is adapting very well and thinks of our chickens as his 13 red headed step sisters whom he spends a good part of each day wandering about with while we garden.

That's it for now, time for me to get out to the garden and pick a salad. I'll leave you with a video of our farm animals enjoying their breakfast.:)

Preparing For Winter

The gods were obviously conspiring against us as we "tried" to prepare for our first woodcutting mission of the season. Normally we have the whole firewood project rapped up by the end of May, we are a little behind this year... too many projects going at once. I was going to go into a whole spiel about all the issues I had with my chainsaws, truck, and other things but will spare you the dreadful details and show some pictures of todays trip instead.

This dead tree will keep us warm for over a month, providing us with almost a cord of wood.


We rolled the rounds of wood over 200' down hill to our truck waiting below.


My wife readies the wood for splitting.


Only a few more rounds to go!

The truck is fully loaded with about 1 1/4 cords of wood. Now where will I put my equipment?

We even had time to hunt for a few stakes and poles for the garden. :)


Cut, split, and stacked all before noon. Only three more trips to go... but not today, we still have some projects to finish in the gardens. I am most fortunate to have such a great helpmate.

What's That Smell?

Mrs. H claims she can't see that great, sometimes I swear she can't hear, but one thing I have learned is that you can always trust her sense of smell. So...whenever her smell sense is activated it behooves me to stand up and take notice. She has caught the scent of bears in the woods (more than once), epazote at a 100 yards, and has an uncanny ability to perceive danger. Like the time we were camped out at a small mountain lake in a thunderstorm and she smelled smoke just before lightning struck a tree on the other side of the lake and caught it on fire. Fortunately, for us, rain doused the fire before the forest could go up in flames.

The other night, while preparing dinner, Mrs. H asked me if I noticed an unusual smell in the house. I did not - at first anyway. We chose to ignore it for awhile but then decided something was amiss and started to investigate. It didn't take long to figure out we were having our first chimney fire. Our home is heated solely with wood and pellets so careful attention is placed on the potential for fire by keeping both chimneys cleaned and free of creosote and always having fresh batteries in the smoke detector.


It turned out that the odor was coming from the chimney which is fitted with a wood stove insert. I immediately shut the draft. The bricks above the stove were really hot and apparently the creosote inside was having a slow burn, it may have been a roaring fire if we had not been home to shut it down. That night I stayed up until about 2:00 AM waiting for the bricks to cool off and make sure that the buildup in the chimney had burned out.


Normally, I clean the chimney for the wood stove every fall just before we start using it but apparently It needs to be done more than once a year and going forward I will clean it at the end of every January as well. Each spring we cut about 10 cords of wood, mostly dead fir and tamarack, but this year we ended up with an abundance of white pine instead...perhaps the culprit of the excess buildup.

The following day I cleaned out the chimney and the noticed "puffy" creosote, which is a definite sign that we had a fire.



If you are using a wood stove please check out these links as it is around this time of year that enough buildup has accumulated in the chimney to start a fire.

http://www.naturalhandyman.com/iip/infchimneyfire/infchimneyfire.html

http://www.ridgwayfire.org/facts_about_chimney_fires.htm