Collecting the Wood

I have shown you pictures of our firewood getting stored, probably enough to cause boredom, but wood collection and storage is a very large part of our life on the farm. We use it to heat the house almost entirely - that might seem strange to people outside this area, and even some who live around here - but, we like it because it is a green renewable resource and free for the labor. 

Ok, mostly because it is free.

You might remember, we installed a heat pump a couple of years ago too. That is partly for emergencies. Which when you consider it, is kind of backwards. In most home the wood stove is installed so they can have some heat just in case the electricity goes out. An emergency at our house is - we left for work and the fire in the stove went out too early in the day. So the heat pump is there to come on at about 3pm if the temperature has dropped to 65. The electric heat (and air conditioning in the summer, I like that too) increases the electric bill a bit, but it is way better than the alternative. I really like coming home to a warm house and it doesn't take much to heat up the house again with the stove since it isn't too cold. In the old days - you know a couple years ago - it could be well into the evening before we warmed up. Been there, done with that.

We also use our own wood to build just about everything around here. It started with the original owner of the property, then the FabHub and the brothers joined in, and now with the nephews they have built the houses, garages, barns, and sheds. Most of it out of trees that the guys cut, run through the sawmill, and nail together themselves.

That leads us to the current story of the big...

old...

very dry Maple tree.

It is very dry, notice how most of the small branches are broken off. FabHub was concerned that if the tree were to fall it would land on his pretty new fence, which as you might be able to tell, is made from pressure treated wood. The first fence we had there was sawmill lumber, it lasted about 12 years or so before the weather finally wore it out. This time FabHub went with a longer lasting product since it is unprotected. 

Anyway, the guys hooked a rope in the big Maple so they could control where it fell by pulling it with the tractor.

Then the chain saw man did his work and the tractor man gave a pull...

 and down it went with a really big crash.

There really wasn't a lot of trimming to be done since a lot of the canopy branches were so dry they shattered on impact. FabHub got a whole truck load of small stuff that hardly needed cutting at all.

As for the big pieces...

They get cut into movable sections... 

 and drug through the woods... 

to the collection site... 

in front of the wood shed where the foreman manages the pile.

Or is that a woodland monster...

Attacking from his hiding spot behind a tree?

That is the story of bringing in wood on the farm.

Now if you will excuse me, it's getting chilly in here, I need to load some wood in the stove.