Salvaging Firewood

I find great satisfaction in every stage of salvaging firewood! First off, it doesn't cost anything, especially if the landowner wants to get rid of standing (and leaning) dead trees, and is willing to use their chainsaw. That's convenient and useful for both parties - and the experience of being out where the birds are, working together, getting good exercise, and bringing the wood from where it grew to where it can provide heat for us, feels more like a privilege than anything else. Here we
are, reaping all these benefits for collecting firewood that we're not even having to pay for, if you know what I mean...

All we had to do on 21 January 2016 was to show up in our pickup truck with gloves on.

The snow was new and fluffy, and the day cold enough that it was easy to brush off the logs and branches so they went into the back of the truck clean and dry. Joyce chose the trees from the strip of woods between the lane and the creek and felled them herself. There were Elms killed by Dutch Elm Disease and Ash that were shaded out, and one Black Walnut. As she cut short logs from the Elm trunk, and 4 - 6 foot lengths of smaller trunks and branches, Fred and I carried them up to the truck. There he lopped the longer thin branches into lengths with his Swedish Brush Axe.

Everything I looked at, and everything I touched, I loved. With my eyes and my heart I felt thankful for every tree whose branches I lifted from the snow and embraced on my way to the truck. Such a sensual experience this wood-gathering! Once when I'd brought my load to the truck, longish sections of branch balanced under each arm, I paused to sip hot tea from my travel mug and noticed that the air was twinkling in the sun. Fred had said something about hoarfrost falling, and there it was!

Back at home we stacked the big short logs to split later, piled the branches for cutting right away with the electric chainsaw, and set the thinner ones aside for the brush axe. A couple of weeks ago we did the same thing, stacked it from floor to ceiling just inside the door of the front porch, and it fed the Findlay Oval cookstove for two weeks of free cooking and heating.

We even have a special adaptation of the cookstove, that has heretofore been considered a misfortune - the hinge to the oven door has been broken for about a year, and we've had to use the oven in the other house. Now what had been a gaping hole displays the butt ends of a neat pile of wood, and it looks as if we've got a model of the Findlay Oval has a dual-purpose oven. Take the door off and it's a wood-dryer!

Every one or two weeks we'll be back for more, as long as the ground stays frozen and it's not too mucky to move about in the woods between the lane and the creek. "There's plenty more where that came from", and we and the Cooks are both satisfied with the arrangement. 

These Elms that we're cutting are those that are dying off in the process of natural selection of trees that are going to eventually be able to survive to full height, resistant to Dutch Elm Disease. The Ashes will likely not have time to develop resistance, as the Emerald Ash Borer is killing them much more quickly. Ahes just down the road have been infected with the tiny green bark boring beetles from from Asia. You can see the tell-tale 3mm D-shaped emergent holes in the bark, and the woodpeckers are flaking off the bark surface to find the insects. It looks like in four or five years there may not be any left in these parts, and at least a quarter of the deciduous trees are Ashes - so there will be plenty of firewood to salvage in years to come. It will be a race between the borer and our very small native borer-egg parasites. They have found a parasitic wasp in Kentucky that has been adapting to live on the larvae of these tiny, destructive alien beetles as they infect the Ashes down there, and we hope something like that happens here. 

Aleta