(Yes, I start lists by counting up from zero when it suits me.)
I heat with wood. I do it myself and it’s not a small feat. I find trees, fell them, buck them into rounds, split the rounds, load the split wood, truck it, stack it, let it dry, haul it to the wood stove, burn it, and I even sweep up the ash.
When the long winter subsides I feel a sense of accomplishment that’s hard to describe. If you’ve done it you know what I’m talking about. If not, you might think I’m a loon. Here’s a hint: heat does not come from thermostats and food does not come from grocery stores… I’m just sayin’.
That said, as summer slid into fall I decided I had less wood stacked and waiting than I wanted. I might have enough… but not the level of excess enough that it takes to make me comfortable. Nor did I have additional resources to devote to the endeavor.
It is times like this that one can either give in to despair or (the horror!) spend money. I chose to buy some extra firewood. It tells you something about homesteading (or my attitude) that buying a product I need with money I’ve earned seems like failure. (For most folks that’s where everything they’ve ever possessed or consumed comes from.) “You’ve gotta’ do what you’ve gotta do.” I sighed and I picked up the phone. Time to buy firewood…
Log truck load of culls?
That’s what we used to do.
I don’t know the price of a load anymore, so I wonder if it still worth buying.
Roughly speaking it’s $60 a cord, delivered, 10 cord minimum, some assembly required.
Also, be prepared to go down the rabbit hole trying to insert yourself in an economic supply chain that starts with a stump and goes to a paper mill. It’s as if nobody ever just sells to the highest bidder if the highest bidder has the fool headed temerity to just show up with little green slips of paper.
I’m a carpenter so there is always lumber scraps. Lots of our materials come on pallets. So I now have 10 or more neatly stacked cords. I have no more room, 2 woodsheds full, stacked under the eves, some under tarps. I had to stop. It was very, very hard.
I understand. Out on my unimproved ten acres I have a couple of cords cut and stacked, and I don’t even have a fireplace or a woodstove. Yet. I have gotten to the point that I can drive right past the stacks of logs left by the utility-company tree trimmers, most of the time.
Why do I suspect that this saga is going to elaborate a transaction far fuller of grief and acid indigestion than bulling ahead and cutting up some more damn trees could possibly have been?
I’m a soft-belly. Brought up in a scholar’s household, prone to gout, and bone idle besides. But I think your hunger for homesteading makes perfect sense. It isn’t MY obsession, but I have my own, and get great satisfaction from them. Hell, what fun would the world be if we all liked and wanted the same things?
That, ultimately, is why I have a violent dislike of “Urban Planners”, Central State Authority, “Top Men”, and all that rot; the presumption that a bunch of ill-educated (They take Marx seriously? Really? After the revelations of the late 20th Century?), arrogant, self-absorbed twits know what’s best for me, and for my neighbor, and some Hutu tribesman in West Africa.
Hell, they can barely tie their own goddamned shoes!
“Why do I suspect that this saga is going to elaborate a transaction far fuller of grief and acid indigestion than bulling ahead and cutting up some more damn trees could possibly have been?”
-Because you’re a realist.
Spoiler alert… in the end, it snows.
And the prices you pay nowadays. It’s criminal.
I keep telling my firewood guy, “You know, I’m just going to burn this stuff…”
He just chuckles and continues to gouge me mercilessly.
It ‘aint gouging if you pay. 🙂
(But yeah, there’s a floor below which the price won’t go.)
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