With the garden opening season coming to an end, and with the weather finally looking as though it is going to change (my poor hydro system thinks it’s been abandoned), we turned to firewood for the past few days.

All summer visitors have been admiring the woodsheds and asking how many year’s worth of burning we had stored.  Most were taken aback when we replied “about a year, if we’re lucky!”

All summer we have been living a bit ‘hand to mouth’ in terms of cut to length firewood, as we wanted to keep the sheds full for visitors and also because we didn’t really have time to spare – it takes at least a day to cut and stack the wood in a single bay, with me cutting and Sue moving the sawn stuff into the sheds.

work in progress

Each piece of wood from the stack is cut into 2 x 18in and one x 12in pieces, the former for the Esse and the latter for the Handol stove in the living room.  I can always tell if a length has been cut by, say, a contractor working for Western Power or by me.  Mine are exactly to size, the others are all sorts of lengths and make the job harder!

Trusty Fergie and M-F saw

The saw bench is almost as old as the Fergie and would probably not be allowed these days – Elf & Safety  – what with it’s drive belt and virtually uncovered blade, but it does the job very efficiently.

Self portrait of the sawyer at work!

Fortunately the weather held for us to get two main bays and the smaller one cleared, giving us probably enough to see Christmas out, before we need to do more. However another dry couple of days might encourage us to get another bay of hardwood into the sheds.

My glamorous assistant (and Sue)

I worked out that we shifted around 480 cu ft (13.5 cu mt) in the two and a half days which equates to around 8 tons of firewood!

some of the hardwood

This Living Green lark is hard work!