I’ve finally dialed in my fireplace. I haven’t used it much over the last couple of years because I couldn’t keep the damn thing from smoldering and setting off the smoke alarms. Quite by accident I discovered why it was performing so poorly: the exterior air supply to the firebox was blocked. I’ve freed it up and now it fires up and draws like a champ. . . as long as the glass doors remain closed. Previously when the doors were closed it could not draw enough air for combustion and die down and smoke would infiltrate through the small gaps on the folding glass doors. With the doors open it would push the smoke and gasses into the house.
I’ve got a little wood put up for this winter and am making good progress against next year’s needs. I bought, sight unseen, two ricks of what was said to be seasoned hardwood. It wasn’t seasoned and it wasn’t two ricks. I felt so sorry for the couple that delivered it that I just paid them and smiled. There is always someone worse off than you or I and these were two of them. Their clothes were worn, torn and tired: I don’t think trousers that he wore would have survived a tour in a washing machine.
The tires were bald on the beat-up old chevy and it leaked oil in the barn where we stacked the wood. As a guess he and his wife drove around finding downed trees and cut them. One rick was Red Oak and included so many ‘pieces and parts’ of limbs that very little of it was split main trunk logs. The second ‘rick’ was about a half rick and was some pretty good-looking split Hickory; it may be dry by next winter.
What I have ready to burn (below 20 percent moisture) came from my farm: — a rick and a half of seasoned Maple, a rick of White Oak, a half of Persimmon, half of Beech, and a rick of Hickory. I’ve got a little under a half-rick of ‘ancient’ wood and the rounds/logs salvaged from an Apple Tree. All together about 5 ricks. Three ricks is a cord.
For next year I have the rick and a half delivered as mentioned above, two full ricks of Red Oak and a rick of Maple. They say that when you heat with wood you get warm twice, it’s actually 6 times: cut, load, unload, split, stack, and the warm glow from the fireplace. Anyway, I was layered with a long sleeve shirt over a short sleeve and as I warmed up dropping a Maple I removed my long sleeve shirt while cutting it in to ‘rounds’. What my skinny ass should have done was give the Poison Ivy vines on those rounds the respect it deserved and left my longs sleeve shirt on. All of this leads us to the word for the day (actually the last several painful days): urushiol (u-ROO-she-ol).
I’m going to drop a large dead Maple that’s been shedding some large limbs this weekend. Earlier, when it had all of its limbs, I thought that it would drop to the west. . . into the fence that kept the neighbor’s cattle at bay. It now seems to be leaning north and will drop safely into my field. I suppose it is 40 or 50 feet high and is around 3 or 4 ft in diameter at the base . This tree is on flat land which means that I can take the log splitter to where I’m cutting the rounds instead of lifting/tossing 60-90 rounds on to the trailer and, once arriving at the wood stacking area, lifting them off the trailer and onto the splitter.