Firewood 101

Sitting here, the last week of March, watching a snowstorm dump inches of white stuff while the thermometer sits at 32 degrees, I can't help but think about firewood.  I'm wondering if we have enough to finish heating the house through a cold April, how long the supply inside the house will last, and when I need to refill the wood furnace.  I don't want to dissuade anyone from homesteading or moving to the country, but I think a lot of books & magazines diminish the amount of work that is required just to heat your house.

Let me start by saying, I love heating with wood and so does my family.  Most years we have a constant fire going for roughly 6 months a year, from mid-October until mid-April.  Our house is a 200+ year old farm house, around 2600 sq.ft., and we are able to keep it at a consistent 71 degrees.  Because our wood furnace is in the basement, our floors are warm all winter, which makes the hardwood floors much nicer to walk on.  Where we live the options for heat are: heating oil, propane, electric, geo-thermal, or wood.  Our house had/has an oil furnace and we didn't want to buy a new furnace since ours was technically fine, it was just expensive to use, so we opted for wood.  Even if we had natural gas available, we would still heat our house with wood most of the time, opting for gas during the late fall/early spring times when it is difficult to keep the house from getting to hot with the fire.

So lets assume you decide to move to the country, grow your own organic vegetables, raise some animals, and heat your house with wood.  The cheapest way to heat with wood is to cut your own.  Your goal for the first year is to cut enough wood for 2 or 3 years, that way in subsequent years, you will always be burning at least 2 year old wood that is well seasoned. Your first winter will tell you roughly how much wood you need each year and chances are you will underestimate by a cord or two. (in case you don't know, a cord of wood is a stack of wood, 4 feet high, 4 feet deep, and 8 feet long)  We burn roughly 8 cords of wood a year, so my wood shed is built to hold 16 cords, that way I always have 2 years of dry seasoned wood.

First thing that you need is a place to cut your wood.  If you don't own land that is wooded, then you will have to find places to cut.  I drive around with my chainsaw in the truck after strong storms, cutting up downed trees & branches for people whenever I see them.  You can also usually find local landowners that will allow you to cut on their property.  Sometimes the deal is only for trees that are dead or already down, or you may get lucky and be allowed to cut anything and actually manage their woodlot for them.  Either way, if you are moving to a new area and don't have your own wooded property, finding wood can be a challenge.

Once you've established a place to cut, now you need to get the wood out and to wherever your are storing it.  In the spring, I will try to cut & haul out 5 truck loads a week until it gets too hot to cut.  cutting the wood is easy, the chainsaw basically does all the work.  Once its cut though, the real work starts.  You will handle each log several times before it's actually burnt: carrying to the truck, unloading, splitting, stacking, carrying to the house, and finally putting it into the furnace.

After you have the wood hauled out of the woods, the next thing is to split it into pieces that will fit in your furnace.  I used to split by hand but after doing that for enough years, I broke down and bought a hydraulic splitter.  I always like how the movies portray the country guy out back splitting wood.  It seems like a very pleasant task and at first, you won't mind doing it.  But when you are looking at splitting 8 or more cords a year, it gets old fast.  What you don't see is the bigger logs where you swing a heavy maul over & over or use a wedge & sledge hammer to split them open, or nasty knots that stop all progress.  When you split your wood, you should end up with 3 sizes of pieces, not counting kindling.  You'll have some smaller pieces, useful for getting the fire going in the mornings or any time it has died down; your average sized pieces, what most people picture when they think of firewood, which is your most used source of fuel; and your large, long burning pieces, used to keep the fire going all night or times you are away from home for long periods.  We have a 15-60-25 ratio of small-average-large sized pieces.

Now you have your wood cut & split, it's time to stack it so that it dries.  We built a 48x8 lean-to on the side of the barn last year to store our firewood.  Prior to that, we stacked it out in the open and covered it with tarps.  If you do cover it with a tarp, make sure that air can still get underneath the tarp, otherwise you are locking in all that moisture.  When you stack your wood, you will want to make sure you have a good mix of small, medium, and large pieces throughout your stack, since you will be burning some of each every day.  Even when we bring wood into the house (which we keep stocked with several days of wood), we make sure that smaller stack has about the same ratio.

 Remember, you are cutting, hauling, splitting, and stacking during the spring/early summer, the same time of year when you will be planting your garden.  There will be days you wake up planning on doing firewood, but the garden will need watered, weeded, harvested, etc., so the firewood will be put on hold until that is done. 

It's starting to get cold and it's time to get wood into the house.  We have a wood room that can hold 4-6 weeks of wood, which is nice, except that it will take the better part of a day getting it stocked, and once winter is here, we generally bring in 1 week of wood at a time.  You will need a mechanism to transport the wood to your house.  We use a 4-wheeler with a heavy duty cart that we purchased at Tractor Supply attached.  The cart is rated for 1200 lbs and has large enough tires that I can take it across the creek and into the woods if needed.  The one thing about wood heat is when you are out of wood in the house, regardless of how cold, wet, windy, snowy, or late it is, you will have to go out and get wood.  This transporting of wood from wood shed to house goes on from the time you start burning in the fall until you are done in the spring.  People have asked why we don't store more wood in the basement, and it's an easy answer .... BUGS!  Wood will have bugs, either inside, under the bark, or just on it.  My house is warm enough to make the bugs active and I don't want to bring them all inside for a party.

Before you are done burning the last fire in the spring, you will start cutting again for the next year, and the cycle continues.  Again, not to dissuade anyone, but you will likely be handling wood 9 or more months out of the year, only getting a break during the hottest months.  But we love heating our house with wood.  The heat is consistent and always on.  A normal furnace heats the room up, turns off when the thermostat hits the key temperature, then cools down until the thermostat kicks in again.  So you have constant highs & lows.  We have noticed that 67 degrees with wood feels a lot warmer than 67 degrees with the furnace.  The conclusion I've come to is 2-fold, 1) the floor is warm because of the radiant heat coming off the wood furnace; 2) there are no dips in the temperature when the thermostat kicks off, so it's a constant 67 degrees.

I hope that I've shed some light on the amount of work required to heat your house with wood.  It is a lot of work, but it is also very rewarding.

Hot Peppers Started

As part of our farming business plan we are going to sell dried, crushed super hot peppers.  The last several years I've grown, dried, and crushed habanero peppers for personal use (although I have enough to last several lifetimes).  I was buying supplies to give out some of the pepper for Christmas gifts (sidenote, we give out baskets filled with stuffed we've canned, dried, frozen from our garden for Christmas) and the woman asked if I was interested in selling it in her store.  That got me thinking about how I wanted to grow super hot peppers, grow food for other people, and eventually make a profit from the farm.  We aren't planning on making a lot of money from the peppers, but if they can at least show a profit on year 1 and we can sell all of our product, then we will expand in future years.  Our whole plan is take it slow and see how it goes.

Anyway, I bought pepper seeds from Pepper Joe's and set out to establish our farm as one of the few suppliers of crushed, dried super hot peppers.  We bought and used leftover seeds from last year of the following:

Carolina Reaper - 1.4 million SHU

Butch T Trinidad Scorpion - 1million SHU

Bhut Jolokia (Ghost Chili) - 900,000 SHU

Habanero - 200,000 SHU

We also have hot, but not super hot:
Giant Jalapeno, Black jalapeno, Pablano, Sporo, Cayenne, Golden Nugget, Firecracker

Most of them have sprouted in the last week and have overgrown their dome.  As you can see by the color of the cells, the dome ends up getting more moisture to the end cells and less to the middle, which had the effect of the end cells sprouting at a much faster and higher rate.

Peppers Sprouting

Now I just need to find a better way to crush the peppers when they finally arrive.  Mortar and pestle just won't cut it for the quantity of peppers that will need to be crushed this year vs previous years.

New Tractor

We got a new tractor, a Kubota L3200 4x4 with front loader.  It is 2x the size of our old tractor and can lift 3x the weight with the loader.  Our old tractor also had turf tires, so the R1 tires are a big plus.  The rear work lights have been really useful and have extended my hours splitting/hauling wood.  We paid extra for the 66" bucket with quick release, which allows the loader arms to use skid loader attachments.  The only downfall is that I have to rebuild my compost bins since they are built for my old bucket which was 54".

Now I just have to find a used set of disc harrows and a 3pt moldboard plow.  I should be able to get both of those at an upcoming auction.  1 step closer to commercial garlic growing.

New tractor bringing wood to the house

Coop Almost Finished

It's been a couple of weeks, but the coop is almost finished.  Between the cold evenings, busy weekends, and being sick, things just haven't got done as fast as we would like.  Anyway, here are some pictures of the coop in progress.

Tractor picking up coop

I forgot to start the coop by building it on legs, so after I got some of the walls covered and it felt sturdy, I put the forks on the tractor and picked it up.  I also wanted to make sure the tractor could pick up the coop, since I will need to move it out of the barn.
 

View of interior

The egg box is built on the side of the coop.  It is 22"x12" and the roof goes from 12" to 16", giving a 4-12 pitch.  I should have grabbed a picture before the siding went on, but if you look at the picture above, you will see that the shingles and the roof extend inside the coop a couple of inches.  I wanted to make sure that I wasn't going to have any leaks, and trying to keep the cost down, this wound up working out really well.

Egg box

Now we just need some warm weather and the chickens are just about ready to head to their new home. I added a roost bar for them to hang out on since they were jumping on top of their waterer. 

I used some scrap pine from the trim of the coop.  The legs are 4 inches long, the roost is 24 inches, and the leg supports are 4 inches.  A couple of them are starting to sleep on it at night.  We are all enjoying watching the chicks grow and get their colors.  It's funny, the pecking order was established almost on day one and the light colored bird on the left of the roost has established herself as the queen bird.