What are You'ins burning for the Winter of 2014?

Arborist Forum

Help Support Arborist Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.
well, let's see........tonight in the OWB was a mixture of popple, red oak, soft maple, elm, and yellow birch. Also on hand: white ash, balsam (was free and easy access), hard maple, ironwood, hemlock, cherry, pine, basswood, and bitternut hickory; might be forgetting one or two more. Not too fussy about segregating species, the temperature and time of year dictate what I normally grab and throw in the stove: like most wood burners, the best hardwoods are used during the coldest winter days/nights; summertime when we're only heating hot water, it's normally less than prime stuff: what's dead and lying on the ground.....somewhere between punky and primo red oak.

If it's easy access and doesn't fall in the marketable timber category, it'll get whacked for firewood, eventually. Never met a Btu I didn't like.
 
This year I have been burning elm, russian olive, piñon and cedar. Next year I will probably burn the same species of firewood. I cannot complain because this is all firewood that I have scrounged. However, I do have of a cord of red oak that will be ready to burn in about a couple of years. The red oak was given to me this past Christmas as a gift. What else I burn next year will depend on what I can scrounge this spring, and have ready for the following firewood season.
 
Pinyon pine. I have a little bit of "town trees" that I scrounge from people's yards. It's my only source of hardwoods. It's a mix of Chinese elm, Russian olive, poplar, mulberry, black locust, and some various fruit woods. I keep some Utah juniper (cedar) on hand for kindling. It splits easily and lights fast.
 
Birch, birch, and more birch. And when it gets real cold birch. First year I've tried using straight birch, seems to be doing well, only hard wood type we have. Usually burn tamarack and red fir. I like the birch because we have lots on our place, don't have to drive lots of miles to find a dead wood tree as with tamarack or red fir. Seasoned hemlock is becoming a popular wood here, much easier to come by, every time we have a storm lots of 2' and bigger trees blow over, just there for the cutting.
They're all green so seasoning is in order, folks have a hard time getting use to cutting a year ahead of time, not normal in this area.
 
Hedge so dead, that it has no bark, but still harder than the hubs of Hades!
 
When I bought my retirement home it had some dead tamarack standing, looked pretty ugly. It had to have been dead 30-40 years, when I cut it down I couldn't believe how solid it was in the middle. I took some of the fatter parts and sliced off the outside rot, it was kind of like paper board and sliced off easily. I then dried the cores in fire-log pieces and it turned out to be every bit as awesome as any hardwood I've ever burned. Anyway, I've been searching in behind my home and have found ten or so more that looked to have blown over in a hurricane we had here in 1970 and I'm tickled to report that on most of them there's about a half to a full inch of the "paper rot" on them...I've already started to harvest them and I'm excited for next heating season LOL.

I did a little research and on most charts this wood is right up there in BTU's with the "hardwood heavyweights" and its higher than some I wouldn't have believed...I think I hit a "motherlode" LOL again.
 
13 cords of Tamarack showed up yesterday so I started throwing that in the mix of pine, paper birch, and red oak.

Gotta love the "Swamp Pine."
 
Its YINS!!!

And I'm loading up on dead ash. Its everywhere. I have 2 big ones to cut in my yard, and 2 more at the neighbors. When thw one in my yard comes down its going to take a decent sized beech with it so that will be put up for 2 winters from now.
 

Latest posts

Back
Top