Back to wood scrounging. I spent an hour or so going through a brushpile that I didn't burn while cutting. Its amazing how when times are good what gets pitched for chaff. I picked up about 3 wheel barrows of nice sized sticks anywhere from 1 inch to up to 2 1/2 inch size. Hey a scrounger can't be picky. After a couple days of drying this should last me a little while for good day wood.
And now ya know why I say what I have been saying for years here. If ya got to touch it, stack it.
That's why I pretty much always cut small, and I ain't gonna run out. I'm years ahead still and let 4 truck loads go the past two weeks to friends and neighbors who are out completely. I give em all a lecture, too, stop being "just in time" and get years ahead. Drive by and see me hand splitting out in the heat in the summer all the time..they run out, I don't. I'm mr nice guy this winter, but not next year.
Been there done that decades ago, never again, that running out.. If I can get the tractor close, down to one inch, if I have to tote it a far distance through the woods, 1.5 to 2 inches. Everything goes in the stacks. I never call the stuff from a tree chaff/brush/swear word, it is all good firewood.
I see people push up huge piles of perfectly good wood with crawlers and tractors and diesel it and burn it, just annoying to me, can't stand to watch it. Just goes against the grain bad for me. Been like that since I was a kid.
Americans are the first to kvetch about energy costs, I mean, everyone does, and the last ones to actually conserve and use wisely what they got. The rest of the world has us pegged, the truth hurts, but we've been pegged righteously, we are a nation of energy hogs and wasters. I admit to some of that myself, I'm running a smoke dragon in a barely insulated cabin, but I dang for sure try, I'll run the little saws some tanks on every tree and get it cut and hauled. This is more or less a rental with my job on the farm, and I don't have the spare loot to rebuild it. If it was mine, it would be insulated somehow, but donating my labor plus material costs just ain't happening, one or the other, not both. . So, my compromise is not waste what I have here for fuel.
I have had people razz me about "stacking kindling" and I go "what's the difference, you get big ones and have to split them smaller, I eliminate a lot of the middle man and just *cut the dang small* as well as the big and into the stacks it goes. Just one exception since I have been here, when they did that butcher job on the huge oak in the yard. I wound up hauling a few loads to the ravine, I mean, I couldn't walk across the yard, so I half cut them and hauled, just to give me a walkway to the porch, then kept cutting and stacking and burnt up some privet with the small stuff. But, that's just once in 8 years. Every other thing I have cut has been cut down to real small and into the stacks, or when the chipper was working, chipped and tilled into the garden.
