Kindling
November 11th, 2015 · No Comments · Posted in Blog, rural life
It’s good to know I can spend a few hours with a hatchet and make all the kindling we need for the winter.
Our primary source of heat is wood and as it happens our wood stove is fairly small. That means the fire doesn’t survive the night. I have to build a new one in the morning. Kindling is what I use to get it started. Ergo, five month’s worth of kindling stacked in the basement.
I scan the pile of logs dumped next to the house in the summer for smaller pieces that will split easily. Then I sit myself down on a rubber tub in front of a big stump of a log and start banging away. The process seems slow, but the pile of split wood builds steadily. This year, we also take advantage of wood scraps generated by construction of our new goat shed. Much of the lumber was cut from whole trees by one of the builders.
When my pile looks big enough, I move in with the tractor and fill the bucket. From there, it’s no trick at all to drive around the house to the basement door and move the kindling an armful at a time to the stack at the bottom of the stairs.
Come morning, I’ll be trotting down those stairs for a few pieces of dry kindling. Soon enough, the fire is raging.
There’s a fair amount of preparation that goes into rural life.
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