Bush Life- Firewood Cutting

Boreal Forest firewood cutting on the farm

Finances   Using a wood burning stove for heating is a mixed blessing. Cutting my own wood on the acreage and farm, the most obvious advantage is money saved. In my city days, winter heating could result in high electric or gas bills, the only choices to be cold or  pay up! Cutting wood involves a few costs-- a good saw to start with! followed by regular maintenance (I'm sure more mechanical types could easily take care of that at home, but my skills and ambition have limits!), then gas  and chain oil (modest amounts of both). Finally, since I am hauling the wood out of the bush manually, sleds and a wheelbarrow are needed; I use inexpensive but durable no-runner plastic sleds meant as toys or for farm utility. Oh yeah, then a good solid axe for splitting wood, and odds and ends I'd have anyway-shovels and brooms for clearing work areas in winter, moving sawdust etc. Adds up if you're buying it all at once, but I didn't have to: some things were here already when I moved home, others were added over time. Once the saw is in hand, yearly costs (even with a couple of service visits to the shop) would be less than one monthly bill for heating  in the city.

The video above shows part of a day's work this winter, collecting sections of log I'd previously cut and stacked in the woods, and bringing them back to finish them.

Work  The biggest input of course, is labour. First there is time spent scouting in the woods for fallen or standing dead trees (you can cut green and let it cure, but I rarely need to). Some years I have to hunt hard to find enough wood, other years, like this one with a lot of fallen trees from windstorms, I have an embarrassment of woody riches! Then I have to cut the trees into movable segments, and pull them home on the sled or wheelbarrow or drag. The time involved in that varies: a number of trees fell right on the acreage this year, so I got a lot of wood with almost no transport time; other areas on the farm can be up to several minutes walk each way. Still nothing to complain about, but it adds up. Then once I have it on the acreage, I have to saw again into lengths that will fit in the stove, and larger chunks need to be split with the axe into usable pieces, as well as some smaller stuff for starting fires ( I also gather branches for that). Finally, it is all either stacked at one of the cutting sites on the acreage, or loaded again onto sleds/wheelbarrow and carried up to the house to be used or stacked. So, a fair bit of work, but even then, not terrible. Generally I do a couple to several hours of work at a time, and in the coldest seasons, that is enough wood to last several days. In warmer times, I'll get more wood than I will need over the coming days and stockpile for colder weather.

Soul Food  But practicalities aside, my favourite part of the whole process is the time spent outdoors and especially in the woods. Of course I can and do go walking in the forest on the farm, even in winter, but I would never spend as much time out there as I do while cutting wood. I get to feel the weather, breathe the fresh air, watch the ever changing skies including sunsets, commune with the trees, hear the birds, even spot the occasional shy mammal. So, hours spent out in 'nature': it is farmland, but much of the vegetation and all of the forest on the farm is native, plus at times I look out across the neighbours' pastures and cows to the mountain views. Fresh air, exercise, healing, inspiration! Some days the work is paramount and I have to focus fully on getting firewood, but most days I take time to enjoy my surroundings, take coffee breaks (adding a folding lawn chair to the repertoire since last fall has been nice!) and regular interruptions to take photographs. Lets be honest, if I won the lottery tomorrow I'd probably never pick up a chainsaw again, but I treasure the time spent this way, and always will...