We do most of our cooking over an open fire. It is amazing how much wood you can go through in a day. In the mountains the temperature can also cool down considerably as soon as the sun sets. Cooking and warmth… yes, a lot of firewood required. Luckily we have lots of trees. Other than needing to cut a few live ones to make room for the trailer, we were able to harvest dead trees. This virgin land needed a lot of culling.
Ah yes, the fire pit when there were still rocks surrounding it.
Another job for the spring.
Katelyn got up at 6 and built a beautiful fire, while some of us did not get up until 8…..or later.
Once you have a good bed of coals, it time to start the food.
It was definitely time to build a wood shed. Daryl chose a spot close to the fire pit and went to work.
Cement blocks were used to support the pallet base. It worked well as the wood chips fall through.
As with everything else, the outside of the shed had to be metal.
While I was off gallivanting in the Okanagan, Daryl finished the woodshed, and loaded it up.
A stipulation for any fire pit is to have water readily available. We have a rain barrel on the side of the shed which didn’t take long to fill up. We also painted the barrel black so it blended better with nature.
The day before Daryl went to town to get a log splitter, we went around the property collecting cut logs to bring near the woodshed. There was a lot! Some of the logs were so big I could only carry three at a time in the wheelbarrow. Guess that makes it understandable why 15,000 steps was the normal for any given day.
When Daryl went to town to get the wood splitter, my job was to empty the woodshed and start filling it back up with small wood that didn’t need splitting. Daryl thought he would be gone max two hours. Well, the two hours came and went but no Daryl. For the world’s best worry wart this was not good! At this time we did not yet have the booster so the phone had to go in a bag and then ‘up a tree’. Eventually the message came that Daryl had run into a bit of trouble and would be late.
That ‘bit of trouble’ was hitting two deer simultaneously Luckily the truck was drivable once the fender was moved away from a tire. Poor deer, but Daryl was unharmed.
We only had the splitter for 24 hours and had a lot of wood. During the middle of the afternoon it was so hot we ended up putting the canopy over the splitter just to be able to carry on.
Amazing what two people can do when they put their minds to it! The process was never ending: pick up a log, put it in the splitter, throw the chunks onto the pile and repeat until your poor back said no more. Then we would switch and repeat the process over and over.
We hopefully have enough wood split to last us through next summer.
When Daryl went back to town to return the splitter, it was my job to restock the woodshed.
We split enough wood to not only fill the woodshed, but to have just as much behind and a smaller pile on the side. By the end of the summer we had burnt all the wood stacked on the side, as well as about a third of the shed.
Now it is packed away for the winter.
We also have six ‘wild’ horses running on the property. They are certainly skittish. Truth be told, I would rather have the horses around than the cows, they do less damage to trees and leave a lot less mess.
Another summer in the books. Look out beaches, here we come.
Cheers
Ruth
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