This morning I stocked my semi-enclosed front porch with firewood for this winter. Considering that our winter heat (beyond the free heat that comes from our attached greenhouse) is entirely wood-fired, our firewood storage facilities have been hopelessly lacking for years. Unfortunately, wood that sits out in the elements around here isn't great for burning, which means I've got a messy/smoky burn more often than I ought to, considering I live in an ecovillage. Of course, I had to build my own house and cooperative kitchen from scratch just to establish my basic infrastructure here, so perhaps I can be forgiven for not managing to get a wood shed built before now, but perhaps not.
Last week I took my crew of three work exchangers and my daughter Aurelia and her best friend Zane, whom I was responsible for that morning, to the pallet mill in Granger, about 20 miles away. We returned with a truck bed and 16' trailer full of pallet wood chunks for firewood. Probably 3-4 cords of wood altogether, and I payed $7 a box for 6 boxes (approx. 3'x3'x3'), or $42 total. Given that split firewood around here last winter went for $65 a truck bed or more, this is a pretty good deal. The wood is off-cuts and scraps from the production of pallets at the mill, mostly oak and cottonwood. But it is only a good deal if I can store and cure that wood in covered conditions.
We dumped the trailer load as far back on the vacant warren adjacent to ours as we could get to be centralized for use in both the kitchen and our house (for which privilege we pay $.02/sq ft in space use fees to the Dancing Rabbit Land Trust, double the residential lease rate we pay for our warren). The wood from the truck bed, a smaller amount, we threw out next to where the truck sat at the head of the trailer, closer to the road and the porch is was destined to inhabit.
Meanwhile we're also building an addition on our house, which is why I have three work exchangers who've joined us for varying lengths of time (and three more already come and gone this season). We've spent much of the past two weeks excavating on the north side of the addition to complete the foundation and make space for the root cellar/storm shelter that we're burying in the earth berm planned for the spot.
Most of that wall will be made of earth bags, essentially woven plastic feedsacks filled with a mix of clay, gravel and grit, stacked brick-style with strands of barbed wire between courses, and tamped in place. So we had to import a 16 ton truck load of 1" gravel, and then another 10 ton load of granular fill, for use in the foundation trenches and then the earthbags.
In order to make room for those loads, that pile of palletwood near the road had to move. We'd planned to store lots of firewood on our porch this winter. In order for it to be ready, though, we needed to plaster the straw-wattle and cob-and-bottle walls, so for much of this week, two of my work exchangers, Sandy and Lyna, plastered. They did a beautiful job. Some jobs around here dictate their own logistical order.
We got enough of the firewood moved the other day to get the two loads of aggregate delivered, but then wanted to jump on an opportunity to share delivery of a tractor-trailer load of raw logs for more firewood, which meant the rest of the pile had to move so we could fit our share in that remaining space between the road and the gravel piles.
So this morning Sandy and I moved and stacked the remainder of the pile to the porch. By the end of the morning, we had a nearly-solid 3'x4'x5' pile of wood stowed on the porch. I don't have any need of the firewood until late October or November, and indeed it was not a pleasant job to unload the wood by hand when it was about 95 degrees out, but it is good because it will have the intervening two months to dry out with the sun through the porch's floor-to-roof south window and the wind blowing through the two doorways, north and south.
Laborious work at every stage, and yet now I have the tangible satisfaction of knowing that I'll have at least that much good dry firewood to burn this winter, and won't have to go dig under a layer of ice and snow for it, knowing all the while that it won't burn that well. Here's to cleaner-burning fires!
Next stage: I've just talked to the Warren Siting committee and gotten a purpose-built wood shed approved for elsewhere on our warren, down near the kitchen where we've already been storing firewood in stacks for a couple years, and where we keep our storage barrels for off-season clothes and things (our house being under 350 sq ft for three people, until the addition is finished). If I manage to get it built in the next few weeks, then we'll have proper wood storage to serve the needs of our house and the kitchen together, and perhaps some other storage space as well. Add it to the list of things to do before winter, which is endless...
