Happy New Year - or as we say here Meilleurs Voeux, et pour la sante surtout! Of course in the current glacial climate, while health is very important, staying warm is totally fundamental.
For Christmas, John got a book on native British trees and their uses, including a section on how to deal with firewood and make a fire that will light first time. It is extraordinary the difference between the opinions in the book, based around we assume a Middle England experience, and what we find here, in a middle but westerly France. I guess the distance between is about 500 miles, but is enough to affect how trees grow, and therefore the properties of the wood.
Neither the author nor we would disagree with oak making a fine firewood if you don't have any other uses for it, but we do disagree about chestnut. He didn't distinguish between horse chestnut and sweet chestnut - the former we would agree is a lousy firewood, but the latter is very good, with an excellent thermal content, albeit that it spits badly. In fact firewood vendors here have to get you to sign a confirmation that you have a closed fire in order to sell it to you. We have a woodburner insert and it is wonderful in that.
Poplar is something else we disagree on. The book said that it was slow to burn and difficult to light - here we tend to regard it as kindling, or something to use if you need a short, quick, intense burn.
The book allows for a one year seasoning period. I would say that if you are felling living trees, then they need a good 2 to 3 years depending on the tanin in the wood. If the tree is long dead when you felled it and isn't a pine, then the wood really just needs to dry out a bit in order to burn. Pine is a problem due to the amount of resin in the wood - the dead pine we felled in the One Acre Wood is useless for burning indoors but is lovely in the chiminea, as it is full of resin which would bung up the chimney, but smells lovely outdoors. Live branches that fall in gales should still be left for a couple of years, as they were green when they came down.
The oak tree we had to fell at a work site shown below will not be ready to burn until the winter of 2012/13 at the very earliest. The haze in the picture is not camera wobble by the way, it is pollen. The tree was felled to make way for a swimming pool, but we didn't get the order until late spring. It was about 200 years old, but the usable trunk section (for construction) was disappointingly short (12 feet) as the tree had not been managed.
As soon as I've finished this comment, I'll pass the laptop to my husband, as he likes anything to do with wood! We have 2 wood burning stoves - one in the house and one in my studio. Malcolm built a log store in the garden, where the logs are stacked in a set order so the most seasoned are available to burn. We certainly need the heat, as we are snowed in, with more snow forcast for tonight!!
Posted by: Anne Donald | 06 January 2010 at 07:27 PM