Nesting

Cozy! The Little House wood stove.

Birds nest in the spring, gathering twigs and other treasures to fashion into little homes. (Okay, the Bald Eagle nest on Squam Lake is huge!) Up here in the North Woods, we nest in the fall, stacking firewood in neat rows — 4x4x8 feet is a cord — to keep us toasty through the winter. Chainsaws are fired up in the winter for felling trees, stripping branches, and cutting logs into firewood lengths. (Frozen ground and a bit of snow cover makes for much easier logging.) The drying process takes at least a full year. (Todd has already cut our wood for 2018!)

How does all that wood make it into stacks? Hard work! Mechanized splitters are back savers, but there’s still plenty of hand work to be done. Below are “before” and “after” photos of Diane’s wood shed. (Noooooo! Don’t take me out to the wood shed!) She heats the farmhouse and does a lot of cooking with a wood cook stove, needing about 5 cords for the season. You could do the math, but take it from me that that’s a lot of wood to stack. She likes to do it listening to music. (It’s how I hooked her on Zac Brown Band.) Diane also has wood stacked alongside her house, shown in the third photo. Notice a new use for old sleds. (Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without!)

So, what if you’re not exactly a neat stacker? The wood shouldn’t be packed too tightly together anyway  — air channels between logs keep the wood dry — and posts pounded in at each end of a stack can prevent slumping. But even if a stack does take a dive, it’s not that big a deal. Think about the medieval cathedral builders before flying buttresses were designed. When those walls collapsed, that was a big deal! Have you read Pillars of the Earth? It’s a favorite in my family. (Even I didn’t see that one coming. An historical fiction book recommendation in a blog about firewood? That’s where my mind goes!)

Sugar House wood

The Sugar House stash is ten cords made up mostly of leftovers from Steve’s sawmill and tree branches too small for regular firewood. It takes a full cord of wood to boil down 800 gallons of sap into 20 gallons of maple syrup. What?! Yes, it’s flabbergasting, if you ask me. (Click here to go to my “Maple Sugaring” post.) The Bartlett house uses another five cords (of the good stuff), and Steve sells about fifteen cords. Good thing there are a lot of trees in our big woods!

We burn a lot of birch, beech, and maple — lovely hardwoods. (We’re a three-cord house.) There are oaks along the left margin of our meadow that may come down this winter. Our porch transitions from summer to fall as wicker furniture heads to the basement and Todd moves firewood from various stacks around the property onto the porch. (Todd has found 101 uses for his little orange tractor. I guess I won’t give him a hard time about that mid-life-crisis purchase. The motorcycle, though — that’s another story…)

Our porch filling up

And finally, as the days grow short and temperatures drop, all that sweat equity is cashed in for the big reward. We really do look forward to snow and cold. We love to skate on the many ponds in Sandwich, to cross country ski on beautiful wooded trails, to sled raucously with our neighbors, and to nest, snug in our houses warmed by wood. Come on, winter! We’re ready!

The winter view from my kitchen window

Stacks upon stacks at the Bartlett’s house