How Cold Was It

Today was a warm day at a balmy 4 F below the freezing point of water or 28 F for those bad at math and science. The day before had been -11 F so it indeed felt warm even if it really wasn't. With some snow in the forecast and as I write this, still a 9 more days left in January, I took the opportunity to refill my wood box above. 

We just burn wood recreationally in a small fireplace in our basement, maybe one weekend afternoon a week. Normally that would be enough wood to last us two, maybe two and a half years at that pace. But the problem is that the wood is getting "long in the tooth" as they say. The lighter colored split wood on the right side of the box is comprised of wood I split probably ten years ago at this point. It is so dry or "seasoned", that I can fill the fireplace with as much wood as it will hold, take a 30 minute nap and wake up to just a few coals. Compare that to the darker wood that you see on the left two thirds of the box above, one of those logs will last a good hour and if I fill the fireplace up, it will burn several hours  before being reduced to a similar amount of coals.

The latter wood, comes from an oak and a black cherry tree that were one of three trees blown down in a derecho that hit our area I think three years ago at this point. I know I have gone through two winters now waiting to burn the small limb debris which I piled up in my ditch and I'm now maybe a third of the way through the third winter. I need snow cover on the ground to cover all the dead, dry grass so to not create a California fire situation here. The previous two winters I have only had the stars align a couple times where I had the snow, was around all day to monitor the fires but couldn't get them to ignite. This winter, we haven't had enough snow to even obscure the grass yet. 

So I sorted through the piled up wood, bucked to length but not split, and found enough that wasn't frozen in place to fill up the box. That should be more than enough to get me through the rest of this winter due to the slower burn rate of that wood. Later this year, I'm going to have to spend some more quality time with the maul to split up the rest of the bigger stuff and cart it up to the box for the next couple winters. After that, my options are to cut up a dead tree somewhere down the bottom of the deep ravine and cart it all the way up the sides of the steep ravine or come up with another source of firewood. Fortunately, firewood is plentiful and dirt cheap these days. I have tried to give the above wood and the third tree that blew down in the derecho, a black cherry that fell into the ravine bottom, away for free but got no takers. Nobody needs firewood that hard to obtain when it is so cheap.