Who Wood’ve Guessed?

Let’s talk about wood.

Since Chris and I moved to Bardmony, it is no exaggeration to say that wood has become a very significant part of our lives. How to grow it. How to maintain the areas it grows. How to deal with the large and small bits of it that fall down from time to time. How to store it. How to burn it. That last one is especially important if you want to avoid turning into a popsicle. 🤣

That said, it isn’t a particularly sexy thing to write about – and it’s certainly one of the least glamorous parts of occupying a house that comes with any amount of trees, but it’s a fact of our life.

And, while lots of people associate this time of year with a garden in hibernation, we have learned that this is a super important time of year for Bardmony’s garden maintenance if we want to have any chance of keeping on top of things later in the year.

This weekend, like most weekends just now, we spent the weekend ‘processing’ wood.

We have lost a lot of trees this year thanks to the bananas storms we’ve had so far – to be honest, we’ve lost track of exactly how many have come down, but it’s something in the region of 10 to 12 trees. It has been both scary and sad, as two trees came down quite close to the house (thankfully, despite literally brushing the house, these caused no damage whatsoever), and we also lost the damson tree in the walled garden, which took out an apple tree on its way down. 😭

All in all, this adds up to a lot of wood to tidy up and prep for use in the house – to give you a sense of the scale of the operation, check out all these piles of wood we need to get through (and this isn’t counting the two trees from the walled garden yet!):

One thing those unfamiliar with wood management on large scale may not appreciate is that, when trees come down, you not only have to process the wood itself – you also have to address BRANCHES. Oh my gosh, so many branches. And, depending on the time of year, leaves. The picture below shows the branches that came off of just TWO trees that came down. We have left them to dry out before we can burn them, and now we have to wait until spring to burn to make sure any little sleeping critters have a chance to get out before we light the fire, but check it out:

Just to give you some perspective, that pile is about 5 feet tall and around 45 feet long!

In one of the last storms, we also lost a tree top (yep, just the top) from one of the trees along the drive that we still have to clear up, cut to lengths, log, and split in the coming months. For now, it just judges us every time we leave or come home, wondering why we haven’t dealt with it yet.

So, what we’ve looked at so far are all just trees that came down in ‘maintained’ parts of the garden, but we have also lost a number of trees in the woods. While the woods are, generally-speaking, mostly left to their own devices to be, you know, woods, we do still tidy up fallen trees and bigger limbs and sticks that come down. Here’s a quick shot of the woods where you can see a pile of some of our smaller fallen trees and one of our baby ‘stick’ piles that we will eventually burn.

One of the hardest parts of wood processing, in our experience, has been figuring out how to store it so that it remains useful for burning. 🔥 One could even say that is…the burning question. 😎

When we took the house, there was a very large wood store near to the house. I don’t have any pictures of it front on, but here is a picture of it from the top (if you look closely, you’ll see two trees in the background – these are the two trees that fell close to the house this year):

This wood store was fairly large and certainly kept the wood pretty dry. However, as it turns out (and the reason the only picture I have of it is showcasing the roof), the roof was made from asbestos panels. One of the last things we did before the wedding was to get specialists in to remove and dispose of all of the asbestos panels. This is what the wood store area looks like now that it’s all cleaned up:

Isn’t that so much better? We were even able to create a little rockery on the far side for alpines and a few other pretties we wanted to showcase. Bonus: we were also able to hide a bunch of cinder blocks underneath the plants – haha!

Since we lost the big wood store, we’ve mostly been storing our wood under cover in the woods and then ringing and splitting into the old game shed:

But, that’s obviously not big enough for the amount of wood we have to deal with now (it typically holds enough for us to burn for a few weeks at a time) and it certainly doesn’t give us enough room to sort it by season and when we want to use it.

So, what to do?

For Christmas, I bought Chris a book called Norwegian Wood – according to itself, this book details ‘chopping, stacking, and drying wood the Scandinavian way’. One of the more interesting takeaways is the use of a Norwegian Round Stack; the idea is that you stack your ringed and split wood in such a way that it keeps the pile dry without the need for any additional structure.

We decided that we’re going to give this method a go this year, and this weekend, I started out building the first round stacks. I have sorted by age, so my stack on the left is a bit older than my stack on the right:

It may not look like much, but this pile is the culmination of about 5 hours of work for each of us. Chris ran the saw and did the splitting, and I hauled the wood from where he was working to a sheltered area under some big firs and started creating the round stacks. According to FitBit, I did about 19,000 steps and burned around 3,000 calories for this work – who needs a gym, right?

Based on the rate we burn wood, we expect that each foot of height for the round stack on the right should last for about 12 days, so when it’s all done, it will be about two months of wood for us for next year. Yay!

Given the volume of wood we still have left to process, we reckon we still have about 80 hours of work to go for each of us to get through it all – since we only work in the garden about 8 hours a week, that should take us all the way to… lawn mowing season! Folks, I cannot wait! 🚜😎

But, for all its lack of sexiness, we both agree that this task is one of the most satisfying we do – there is something to be said for kicking up your feet after a long cold day in the garden running the chain saw and stacking wood. At least you don’t have to feel guilty about the pizza you’re about to order! 🍕

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed this little peep into one of the ways we spend our weekends. All the work truly is worth it when you’re enjoying a fire with your own wood that you processed yourself… Just ask Schnitzel, though come to think of it, the lazy little sod didn’t even offer to help!

And, just so you don’t think it’s all drudge over here, I’ll leave you with one last image. Spring is certainly around the corner, as attested to by the absolute zillions of snow drops we have popping up all over the place. Here’s a quick shot of the some snow drops under our copper beech, which has thankfully managed to escape the storms unscathed thus far.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend, everyone!