harvesting winter warmth

Kaley learning to chop wood like her big brother.  The kids help every year to bring in the firewood, they chop and stack as a team.   We've had a solid week of gathering and harvesting our firewood for this coming winter. This is a yearly ritual that is never missed, it takes us a week to bring in a years supply of firewood

 A burn pile to clean up the limbs.  After the tree is felled, the next step is to remove all the limbs, any big limbs will become firewood, the smaller ones are all burned.  Notice the foxglove in the background, it borders most of our 10 acres of forest, wherever there's enough sunlight.

J with the chainsaw hard at work.  He fells the trees, removes the limbs,

then cuts the logs into sections the right length to fit in the wood stove. 

About half the wood was harvested the end of May and put in piles and the rest we are getting in late.  Ideally all firewood should be cut, chopped and stacked in May, so it can dry and cure throughout the summer, then it will be dry wood for the winter.   Well, better late than never, some of it is already dry because it's called standing dead.  We harvest smaller Douglas Fir, (if we ever harvest the big stuff it's used in beams and building materials) and larger Alder, simply because that is what we have in our wood lot, Alder is like a weed in the Northwest, it grows everywhere, but when it's dry it's considered a hard wood.