Getting in Firewood

Cold weather has finally come and it's time to bring in firewood. We heat our house with a wood burning furnace. Every year there are trees that die and fall or either are blown over by the wind so Noel never has to cut down live trees. However, we had some dozer work done this fall and rather than pile the trees to burn in a brush pile, he gathered the best ones into stacks for us to heat with. We bring the logs to the pasture near the house, then he can saw them up

into lengths suitable for the furnace. It can take a really big chunk of wood, but not this big,

so it has to be split. Now this is one of the best pieces of equipment on the farm, the BobCat; it has all sorts of attachments from post hole digger, to post driver, spear for loading hay, bucket for loading dirt, a grapple for loading brush, and this log splitter. While watching it at work I thought of how much hard labor it saves, comparing now to the way people used to have to cut and split wood. Just think how long it would take for two men to saw a tree like the one in the above picture, even if the tree was already lying on the ground. And how many swings of a sledge hammer onto an iron wedge would it take to split a chunk of wood that large.

While he is splitting the wood, I load into the back of this little handy RTV, (see, he's the brain and I'm the brawn), we haul it to the house and unload it under the porch at the furnace room. Let me tell you, this is not a job for warm weather! Getting in firewood gives you three chances to get the warmth out of the wood: 1)while loading it; 2)while unloading it; 3)when it's burned. Are you staying warm?