Edward Barker
ArboristSite Lurker
It's just about time for our annual firewood gathering project and I have been browsing the threads looking for ideas to improve our method. There are many good ideas here and one thing I notice is it's not a "one size fits all" type of project.
My wife and I are both retired so it is easy to us to dedicate a few weeks a year to our firewood. We live on an acreage in Northwestern Ontario and harvest our firewood from our property. We use a snowmobile and wait until this time of year (February) when there is adequate snow to provide decent access. We select the trees we are going to harvest and then make trails to them, cut them down and block and limb on site. We pile the limbs for burning at a later date, bark, saw shavings etc. all compost back into the forest floor. I should mention that it is a easier on the saw and requires a lot less sharpening doing all this cutting when there is a cushion of snow beneath your cuts, I also use a wedge in the cuts to keep my saw from binding We have a 6' sleigh that we haul with, the larger blocks we can roll onto it, we find this to be easier in the snow as we spend a lot of the time working on our knees which means a lot less bending. We haul it to our pole shed where we have a large enough work area for the next stage. Using the snowmobile sleigh has the advantage of being able to get on our knees along side of it and tip the rounds out, it is very quick and surprisingly easily done, with the larger loads we may have to pull a few of the rounds off with a pick first.
Stage two is splitting and stacking, we use a Ariens 27 ton wood splitter and a Kubota tractor. We roll the rounds into the bucket of the tractor and raise it to a height to easily roll them onto the splitter. My wife runs the splitter and I carry and stack them on pallets in the pole shed as they come off the splitter. We are a year ahead so the wood we process this year will be for the winter of 24/25.
We have a woodshed close to the house that we put a winters worth in at a time after it has dried sufficiently.
This is a system that we have found to work well for us.
My wife and I are both retired so it is easy to us to dedicate a few weeks a year to our firewood. We live on an acreage in Northwestern Ontario and harvest our firewood from our property. We use a snowmobile and wait until this time of year (February) when there is adequate snow to provide decent access. We select the trees we are going to harvest and then make trails to them, cut them down and block and limb on site. We pile the limbs for burning at a later date, bark, saw shavings etc. all compost back into the forest floor. I should mention that it is a easier on the saw and requires a lot less sharpening doing all this cutting when there is a cushion of snow beneath your cuts, I also use a wedge in the cuts to keep my saw from binding We have a 6' sleigh that we haul with, the larger blocks we can roll onto it, we find this to be easier in the snow as we spend a lot of the time working on our knees which means a lot less bending. We haul it to our pole shed where we have a large enough work area for the next stage. Using the snowmobile sleigh has the advantage of being able to get on our knees along side of it and tip the rounds out, it is very quick and surprisingly easily done, with the larger loads we may have to pull a few of the rounds off with a pick first.
Stage two is splitting and stacking, we use a Ariens 27 ton wood splitter and a Kubota tractor. We roll the rounds into the bucket of the tractor and raise it to a height to easily roll them onto the splitter. My wife runs the splitter and I carry and stack them on pallets in the pole shed as they come off the splitter. We are a year ahead so the wood we process this year will be for the winter of 24/25.
We have a woodshed close to the house that we put a winters worth in at a time after it has dried sufficiently.
This is a system that we have found to work well for us.