We put the wood crew to work today and we processed some wood! I’m blessed with some HARD workers! They all told me today that they prefer getting wood in the winter. No bugs, less devil’s club and they like the cooler temps. We bought that log splitter about 17 years ago and it has sure earned it’s keep. When we first started heating with wood I naively thought I would have the time and energy to split our firewood by hand. Nope! I split a little over a truck load, and realized a log splitter was worth the money in our situation. It is on its second engine now. It sure beats using a maul!
We are blessed by our neighbor’s misfortune and generosity. This area of Alaska is undergoing a severe spruce bark beetle infestation. These bugs get under the bark of the spruce trees and eventually kill them. They thrive on the older mature trees and they have decimated thousands of acres of Alaskan spruce forests. Our neighbor had to have 7 or 8 very large trees taken down and he offered us the wood. We have been having lots of great fires lately from this wood. Normally we burn birch due to the fact that it has more BTU’s than spruce. However, spruce burns just has hot, but not as long. Another benefit of the spruce is that due to it’s pitch vs the sap of the birch it cracks and pops loudly as it burns. We are enjoying our noisy fires!