squirrelling biomass

After all the recent storms, many trees are down around here, and as I run I often look at fine-looking piles of wood and think, "if only you could be mine."  Today my mom had me over to her house to help her and David and his son Ethan take care of a big holly tree that had come down. I got there a little late, though about when I said I would, and saw that the big tree had already made its way out to the street.  So there were these good-sized logs just sitting there. A little longish, perhaps, but then I have a big fireplace, now don't I?

So I loaded those puppies into the conveniently present Prius and carried them back around town to the crib.  But there in the wood stack were big sections of the Poplar that the people from the electrical company took down in November of 2013 because branches were encroaching on the electrical lines (here's what I wrote about it then).  I burned a bunch of that bad boy this winter, but there are huge sections of it that had just not wanted to split, even when I tried 4-6 weeks ago before we got our big snows.  But I didn't want to pile new wood on top of them if there was hope for them yet.  So I got out the old axe to give them one more chance.

And they split.  I guess 16 months is kind of a magic number for curing wood, or something about the change of the seasons loosened them up.

Meanwhile, I have been converting the seeming "yard waste" of branches taken down by the storm into what I like to think of as "yard bounty," by breaking em down into short sections and piling them up as kindling up under the deck getting ready for next year.  Soon, I will need to take all the ashes out of the fireplace.  I was going to put them in the compost, as I have on occasion in the past, but the internet just told me not to.  Sigh.