The firewood is finished

This time of year, a critical fall chore in rural areas is to get firewood put up for the winter. In the Lewis household, this chore often falls on me since I don't mind splitting and stacking, and it frees Don up to do more complicated projects.

I started by assessing our woodshed in mid-August. This space was mostly empty and had accumulated a variety of things we tucked in to keep them out of the rain over the spring and summer, including the oversized canvas umbrella I used while picking blueberries.

Also – and crucially – in the woodshed was located the manual hydraulic log splitter. Our gas-powered log splitter had been stranded on the other side of the property with a flat (actually, destroyed) tire, so through late spring we had been using the manual splitter to split firewood.

Late last fall, we had ordered a few extra cords of firewood to supplement what we already had on hand, just in case it was needed to get us over the winter. As it turned out, the firewood was fairly green (not dry) and the splits were huge, far too large to fit into our stove. In short, the entire delivery would have to be resplit, and even then the wood was too green for effective use unless the stove was already very hot.

We tried to make the best of it by stacking some of the smaller pieces in the woodshed, but soon gave up. The wood pieces were simply too large and too green  to use. So the majority of the pile sat there, tarped but unstacked, all winter long. Over the summer we untarped the pile to let the wood dry out, which it did very nicely.

Now that I was tasked with firewood, the first thing I did was examine the wood that was already in the woodshed, much of which was too large to burn (but at least it was dried out).

I used the manual log splitter to split it down to size...

...then restacked everything. I concentrated on stacking everything as tightly as possible, and up to the absolute rafters.

Meanwhile we finally got a replacement tire on the (gas-powered) log splitter, so we towed it around to the front of the house, and I settled in to resplit the cords of firewood that had been drying out for the last year.

I kept the canvas umbrella in the woodshed, since at this point (late August) I was still harvesting blueberries and needed it for shade.

The blueberries finally petered out, so I moved the umbrella back into the barn and started stacking firewood in earnest.

Once the pile of wood was resplit and all stacked up, we started moving miscellaneous wood from the barn side of the house to the front where the log splitter was. These were rounds that had been harvested from dead trees we'd taken down.

We loaded these into a box Don built to go on the back of the tractor, and pulled them around to the log splitter.

This left me with plenty more wood to split.

Some of the rounds were enormous. These were the monsters we tried to tackle with the manual log splitter without success. The gas-powered splitter conquered them with very little effort.

As the weeks went by, I split and stacked everything I could lay my hands on. It was my goal to get that woodshed stuffed to the brim.

Row by row, I built up our supply.

However when everything we had on hand was split, we were well short of that goal of having a stuffed woodshed. So ... we ordered one more cord of rounds, just to fill in the gaps.

Splitting that last cord only took two or three days of working a couple hours at a time.

Second-to-last row...

As I wound down on the splitting, I was also playing a game with how much gas was left in the log splitter. I wanted to use it all up so we wouldn't have to drain the splitter before putting it away for the winter. But it was a fine balance, because I wanted to use that gas power to split the bigger rounds. So I pulled every remaining large round out of the pile...

...and carted them over to the splitter.

As it turned out, the gas in the splitter ran out just as I finished splitting the largest rounds. So I turned to the manual splitter to finish the batch.

And that was it for splitting.

I had an enormous pile of split wood needing to be stacked. The question was how much of it would fit into the shed. All? Most? Would there still be room in the shed?

I stacked and stacked. When each row reached the top of the shed, I played Tetris to see how many wood pieces I could shove into any available opening.

Almost finished...

Success! The woodshed is filled side to side, back to front, top to bottom. Based on the dimensions, Don calculates that we have almost five cords of wood, plenty to get us through even the harshest of winters. To me, a full woodshed is a thing of beauty.

There was a fair bit of leftover firewood. It took three loads in the Gorilla cart...

...and I stacked it on the back porch. This will be the first firewood we use this winter.

Now it was time for the cleanup. I had been tossing kindling-sized pieces into a pile...

...so I gathered them up and put them in a bin on the back porch for easy access.

I raked up the bark and other debris...

...and loaded it into the Gorilla cart. I pulled the cart into the pasture to dump it in a pile to be composted down. The cows instantly came to investigate. "Is it edible?"

This left the area in front of the woodshed nice and tidy. We'll tuck the log splitter away shortly.

The very last thing we'll do is hang a tarp loosely over the front of the woodshed to discourage rain and snow from blowing onto the wood. But for now – the firewood is finished!