Cutting firewood

It's been getting chilly around here in the mornings -- down to 25F or so. We were totally out of split firewood, so up to this point we'd been limping along with odds and ends of wood for our woodstove. But now that our busy season is over, we finally have the time to split some proper firewood.

Front porch, before:

Don sharpened the chain and made sure the saw was tuned up.

Then my manly man got out there and cut up a tank-ful of rounds. (What this means is, he cut rounds until he used up one tank-ful of gas in the chain saw.)

After that it was time for the girls and I to get to work. Out came the log splitter.

This baby has the power to split ginormous rounds, rounds that would take us fifty or sixty hard whacks with a maul just to get it open.

It can also tackle gnarly, twisty pieces of wood that would defeat a mere maul (not to mention human backs and arms).

My job is to split. The girls flip a coin to see who moves the wood, and who stacks. Younger daughter got the moving job this time. She moves rounds close by me so I can split them, then wheelbarrows the split wood to the porch where Older Daughter stacks it.

Here Older Daughter is waiting for the first load of split wood to be brought.

The kids are efficient. I barely had time to accumulate a modest pile of split wood before Younger Daughter had it loaded in the wheelbarrow.

And Older Daughter stacked it the moment the firewood was dumped on the porch.

At the end of an hour's worth of work, we had a decent start.  Front porch, after:

We'll keep splitting a little more every day (stacking what we can on the porch and putting the overflow in the barn) until the weather gets nasty, then we'll stop until we run short again.

It feels good to be doing farm chores again.