My daughter came across this very nicely done wood burning book in at an antique flea market in her Maine travels. She lives just outside of Portland in Westbrook Maine and had been on a hiking trip up in the Moosehead area when she found this. Printed by Harpswll Press in 1973. I'll post some pics of the illustrations in it too. I started burning when I build out home in '79, so the info in this book was right up my alley.
Nice! Does it mention the "3 year plan"...or is it of the "cut it in the spring so it can season over the summer, then split it right before you toss it in the woodshed for the winter burning season" school of thought?
First thing I looked for. "For fresh cut wood... usually 6 months to a year is required for thorough seasoning." No mention of a 2 or 3 year plan. However it does provide a number of tables and detail regarding the weight of a cord of a number of wood species, and goes into great detail of 25 to 60% of the wood content is water. But it totally misses the idea of holding wood for multiple years in order to properly burn. Remember this is the days of smoke dragons. It talks of burning green wood in a hot fire, and save seasoned wood for slower overnight fires. We were pretty basic back in the day. My idea was always buy or cut in the spring, burn in the winter. Clean the flue yearly, find the burn cruising heat for your stove and land on it. Worked pretty well for my Garrison One (the big one).
Nice find, I have an old wood burning book and it talks about a 2 year plan, one year outside and one year inside.
I need to take some more photos of it. To be fair, although they don't actually say, "season wood for a year or more" they do imply it by talking at length and it a lot of scientific detail of water content percentages in various types of wood. I think a lot of this is the "Old Mainers" mentality where cutting in October burning in December is pretty common, even where I live in Massachusetts the smoke dragon mentality is commonplace. PS No offense to the Old Mainers out here, I luv ya! But you do got some pretty crusty back woodsmen up there that would burn rubber tires if they could fit 'em in the stove.
Not just in Maine, up here as well. My FIL used to burn his old used oil in the stove, made starting green wood pretty easy.
Gee, I never thought of that. and here I've been bring all my used Harley and Honda motorcycle oil back for recycling all the time. Hmmm. I wonder what that would do to a CAT...
