Today was a fantastic day on the farm. Two of the kids were down to the house with their wives. It was great to see them all! It was well timed too, in the sense that it was rainy today, and there was no working outside. We also had a delivery today that required us to take the front-most door off the house, and it was good to have help with that from our second, even though he was hopping along on a bad ankle.
So did I do anything sensible and go out to the shop to work, as it has a roof on it, and rain is no excuse? No. I did not. It was a restful day instead. We put a fire in the woodstove, and I worked on an “About Us” for Missus’ website. It is hard to get the text together to tell a story about us when one must decide what to include, what to exclude, and what to emphasize and what to only mention. There is a lot to our story, but not all of it is relevant to the business or the ethos behind it. I think what we need people to do is come to the “About Us” section in order to ‘get it’ on what we are all about. I will try a draft later with that in the front of my mind and see what I can come up with.
With the rain coming down yesterday and today, I have been off from the firewood work. I have got the trailer empty of it, and once I take out some garbage in that, I will be ready to go out back and fill it again for more stacking. It is important I get that pile of wood out by the sawmill cut down and split so I can see how much we actually have, and how much more I need to go get. The bunk is still less than halfway full, and that is a concern. But I will say this of it; the wood is mostly up to length, about 19 inches. The lengths are consistent, and because they are, the stacking has gone better this year than any gone by. I have several rows stacked up to just more than 6 feet high, and none of it wobbles like it is going to tip over. I think when the wood out back is split up and stacked, the bunk for winter will be about 3/4 of the way full, not necessarily including the middle aisle, which I normally don’t fill, but this year plan to because we always seem to come up just a little short.
I am trying a new burn in the stove this year. I am putting in two cookie cut pieces at the bottom, then stacking some split logs on top and doing a top-down burn. I tried it today. It went on for maybe eight hours before I put in more wood on top of some of the charcoals. It lit right up and burned on nicely. The point of it is to get a longer burn time out of the wood, especially for those overnight fires that keep the chill off the house and keep the pipes from freezing. It was promising today. I have seen a few people on YouTube lately that recommend a top-down burn for longevity, though they don’t agree on the way the wood is stacked for it. The primary difference being if the split logs are packed front to back or side to side in on top of the cookie pieces. I went front to back, perpendicular to the air inlet pipes because that direction fits the long logs better, and I am not going to recut the whole pile I have outside this year. I could cut shorter one’s going forward though. But then I would have to take long ones for hot burns and shorter ones from elsewhere in the bunk for long, fast burns.
The weather is clear tomorrow and beyond. It is time to get the work done I owe Missus in her shop, then get this wood done!