When we first got our woodburning stove, I did have this romantic notion that we could gather most of the wood we needed ourselves, scavenged from fallen trees in the landlord’s woodland with nothing but a bowsaw and the time to carry it home. The other half has disabused me of this notion, partly by luring me up into the woods on the pretence of photographing badger poo (he knows how to show a girl a good time) and then having me – seeing as I was up there – help him saw up some fallen birch and carry it down from the woods. He’s been doing this on and off all winter and a couple of months of steady effort has accumulated this pile (actually now a little bigger) of wood which will still need to be sawn, split and stacked, then seasoned for a minimum of a year and even then will probably last us at most a month in the depth of the winter. Each length takes probably half a man-hour’s labour, if you include lugging it down from the woods (but not counting the three days recovery time after ferrying the big one at the front). And while it was undoubtedly a carbon-neutral operation, clearly we were going to have to come up with something a little more scalabe if we were actually going to accumulate wood faster than we could burn it.

1 cubic metre of wood
So much easier – if you’ve the contacts – to ring up and order a couple of these, which arrived yesterday morning. We spent a happy few hours sorting and stacking the wood – an elaborate classification system has evolved with the wood that wasn’t too misshapen but could do with a bit more seasoning now neatly walling the wood shed, the wood from the top of the bag (which is always a little dryer, funnily enough) handy for the stove now, and other piles in various states of readiness to burn in various caches around the other half’s shed empire. This was more than enough to have us peeling off a few of the winter layers, especially when the sun decided to emerge as well. Truly there’s nothing like shelling out for a mega order of wood to make the weather gods relent and give us a glimpse of spring.
Still, there’s something very satisfying about a well stacked wood pile, although we are just amateurs at it. As long as the winter doesn’t linger too much longer, we’ll have really well-seasoned stuff to burn next year, all the while, of course, hunting round for the wood for the year after that, and beyond. In fact, if we were really serious and had the land we’d be planting the trees for the coppice that would be supplying our stove for decades to come…
Oh and the (possible) badger poo? Very difficult to take a decent photograph of, as it happens. If anyone can identify anything positively from this, I take my hat off to them:

Badger poo?
In fact, I may just take my hat off anyway. It’s almost warm enough, at last…