I get by with a little help from my friends. East Pole Journal V.II Ep. 14

My yard's a mess during wood gathering season.

Some years ago my friend Joe May sent me a gadget that measures the amount of moisture in wood. You can tell if your firewood is dry enough to burn, at least that’s how I figured it. As a result it sat unused for much of the year, often forgotten, at least until today.     In my waking thought process today I decided to stick it out here as long as I can rather than run at the first sign of anything resembling the big thaw we call breakup. I am behind on firewood. At this point I’m about half a cord short. I have enough on the ground but there’s a lot of hauling and splitting and stacking to be done. On top of that, after the miserable January and February I spent out here I figure Nature owes me a few extra days.

     To confirm my resolve I heard a weather show on the radio where some expert says we are going through a March when the temperature never went above freezing, we have a deep compacted snow pack and it looks like winter will stretch on into April. So, I’m staying.

     One problem. I am running out of the seasoned birch firewood I cut last year. I have enough to just about make it to the end of March, which was all I planned for. What I’ve been cutting this year ain’t going to burn yet so I needed to take down one of the beetle-killed spruce around here. They are usually dry enough to give an adequate burn.

     I had picked out two that looked good but how do you choose? Wait, hey, let’s see which one is drier. And there comes Joe May’s General MMD4E Moisture gauge. So with the instrument in hand I headed for the first tree, slogging through thigh deep soft snow until I reach it to push in the probes. 20.56% moisture. Even a neophyte like me knows that’s not good. Too bad, that one was closer to the house and near one of the trails I’d made for hauling the wood up from the two birches I have been working on. More slogging through deep snow. I am not sure which spruce species I am looking at. The first one has a tight bark pattern and yellowish wood while the other has a ragged bark pattern and whitish wood. After another 100 feet of slogging, I jammed the probes into the second tree. First reading 16.4%, but a couple of other spots showed between 11% and 13%. That falls into the medium range and is probably burnable.

    Then I saw where another friend had helped. The song’s line and the headline say friends (plural). I’ve written about all the moose trails around here in the past week or so and look at this: there’s a moose trail that passes near the tree and continues on to my main uphill trail. That means pretty easy hauling once I get the moose trail packed down a little more.

Next step grab a chainsaw and within less than an hour I had the tree down and sections cut about halfway along the trunk. I pulled a couple of them up the trail in the sled and split them and some are burning in the stove right now. After nearly tearing my arms out of their sockets mangling birch, splitting light spruce is delightful, even fun. That whole process of felling the tree cutting up the trunk, hauling a couple pieces uphill and splitting them took less than an hour all told. And, that was on top of my normal hours put in handling the birch. 

     Like I said I get by with a little help from my friends. So, thank you Joe May and thank you anonymous moose. You made my day and take the pressure off so staying here a little longer than usual. And, there should be enough firewood in that spruce I took down to keep me warm this year with a lot left over for next year.  Winner, winner, wish I had some chicken for dinner. 

ADDENDUM: 

Treating wood for moisture

Upon awakening the next morning my wandering mind produced another epiphany regarding moisture content in wood. I have bragged for years how the March sun lights up my deck for four or five hours every afternoon sending the temperature in a thermometer that gets the full force of that sunlight into the stratosphere as high as 70 degrees or more. Why not, I thought, lay out a bunch of this new spruce I have cut on the deck and let the sun suck the moisture out of it. So, I cut and split some and laid it out. At the start a little after noon, I checked moisture in two chunks with my Joe May approved General™MMD4E moisture gauge. One chunk from the center of a larger piece read 18.9% moisture. The other, taken closer to the outer edge just under the bark read 15.9%. Sixteen percent is the breaking point between high and medium ranges on the meter. A couple of hours of overcast shortened the direct sunlight period, however when I checked them at 9 p.m., the deep wood read 17.6 on the gauge, a drop of more than 1%. The other showed a similar drop at 14.7%, more than 1%. That doesn’t sound like much, but it is a gain, making the wood more burnable. I have two or three weeks in that sunshine so I am going to leave it out in the sun and add to it. Now if I only had something that measures BTUs. Day by day drying progress: % moisture content

Start     Center     Outer rim

Begin     18.9%     15.9%

Day 1     17.6%     14.7% (Haze for part of day)

Day 2     15.8%     13.4% (Full sun)

Day 3     14.3%      9.2% (Full sun) 

Day 4     11.45%     7.45%  (Hazy all day)

Day 5     15.2%      15.9& (Full 12 hours plus snowing)    

 

AND: Here’s that “but.” I have been testing at the ends of the pieces to get the recorded numbers. Just as a “what if” tonight I tested in the middle of the chunk, the lengthwise middle.

No numbers even close to ”medium.” Synopsis: The sun has a noticeable effect, but it’s not as universally strong as first indicated. All the readings were between 17 and 20 percent, too moist to be effective fuel, But, yes, there’s another one. I learned how to burn it. By itself in the stove it tended to smolder and eventually go out. However if I get a good fire going at first, using the last of the precious birch from last year, and then built up a bed of coals and kept the fire blazing, it burned fine. It takes more tending to keep it going, but I have lots of that wood. Only one problem; it was 90 degrees in here last night when I went to bed.

East Pole Journal