Fetching Firewood


 We heat our house with an outside wood furnace.  The indoor furnace can be run on electricity and at times we do use that option, usually in early spring or late fall when the weather is too warm for us to want to have a sustained fire burning, but cool enough to need a bit of heat in the early morning.

In winter, however, we keep the wood furnace burning and it does well at helping keep our electric bill under control and keeping the house toasty.  However, feeding the furnace is always a chore.  In fact we need to get a couple more loads of wood today.

Here last week Gary was processing more firewood for the furnace.  This is actually just to the East of the front of the house here.  There to the right of the picture you can see a mess of weeds and wood.  That is the remains of a dead tree that fell last year.  Gary has been processing it for the furnace.  And then there in the center of the picture you can see him squatting down sawing yet another dead tree so it won't fall unpredictably.  It is scenes like this that harrow my soul.   So very nerve-wracking watching him do dangerous things like this.  

I have a short video of this incident, but I've no idea how to get it to post here from my phone, as I am on the laptop.  In any case, the saw blade got pinched in the cut and Gary yanked and wiggled it and yanked and yanked for quite some time, all the while I could hear the tree making popping sounds.  My nerves were popping too!  But he finally got the blade freed, made another cut and the tree went over. 

 We are having an issue with trees dying; both around the house here and out in the pastures.  We aren't sure if it's from the series of droughts we have had the past couple of summers, or if it's because of oak wilt.  Here's an excellent article on it:

  https://mdc.mo.gov/trees-plants/diseases-pests/oak-wilt  I hope the link works, it's been awhile since I have tried anything like this.  

Anyway.  It affects mostly red oaks.  I hope the other types of oaks are resistant to the wilt.  It would break my heart if all of our oak trees died off.  Aside from the walnut, hickory and other smaller trees, oaks comprise our main forest.  We do have cedar, but I am not a fan, they have too many allergens.  

But in the meantime, the dead trees make for good, easily accessible firewood. 

 

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