All of us that live in Boreal forest regions of the world our primary tree is spruce then popel then white birch. In my area white spruce is 98-99% then 1-1.5% people and the remainder white birch. I burn 15-25 cords of spruce a year. If I could get birch that would be cut by40-50%.
John D Rope Hi friends! Thanks for pointing this thread and article out to me. I’ve been on a 72 hour shift. I’m just catching up now. I agree with you guys. As most of you know, I live at 9k feet. My brother lives just south of me at 11,600 feet! He also burns local wood for heat. As you can probably guess - not much hardwood up here. I have a good stockpile of hardwood that I’ve scrounged in the Denver metro area, on my way home from work. But the vast majority of the firewood that I burn is local softwood. Ponderosa Pine Limber Pine Lodgepole Pine Douglas Fir Spruce Rocky Mountain Juniper Aspen Those are the vast majority of what I burn. There is an endless supply of all of those softwoods here, and I feel very fortunate about that. I will never run out of firewood. I’ve been burning softwoods my entire life. I clean my chimney twice per burning season. I hardly get any soot at the bottom of the pipe when cleaning. As everyone else here has mentioned, the key is to properly season your firewood prior to burning. The climate here isn’t nearly as cold as Rope’s, but I’ve weathered my fair share of below zero, whiteout blizzards - with the power out. My family and I haven’t frozen to death yet!
I am in Cote Nord Quebec and in the Boreal. Here we have a ton of black spruce which is decent. But we also have a lot of white and yellow birch, yellow is excellent firewood. We are not allowed to cut coniferous trees for wood here, only deciduous, so while black spruce is easy to come by we mainly burn birch, which I won't complain about
Do you mean you can't cut a live conifer down? Or you can't cut and use conifers at all...like even down (blowdowns, storm damage etc) trees?
I brought this up to the house to use, mainly as kindling.... Pine, probably loblolly or shortleaf, that has been split and in a shed for at least 10+ years. It was here when we bought the place in 2017, and the lady who was here had been out for at least 4 years before they decided to sell.... Think it's dry enough and safe to burn??
Single digits here today, burning some pine to keep house temps up while the hardwood coals finish burning down before the next belly full o ash, cherry n oak.
We cant cut down any live trees around here either no matter what type they are. Standing dead is allowed as long as it isn't to close to water or isn't a habitat tree. Occasionally I see people who don't know their trees mistakenly drop larch in the winter since it doesnt have any needles on them so they think they are dead. I burn almost exclusively soft woods mainly larch and doug fir which is superior in btus to lodgepole pine, spruce and aspen which are also in abundance in our area. I quite like lodgepole pine but for me its a btu storage issue so I stick with the higher btu softwoods so I can get more bang for my buck in my stacks. I do have a bit of birch that Ive been working through this year and last but its hard to get standing dead as it punks out so quick as most of us know. Everyone around here burns conifers in their wood stoves since its what we got.
I lived in Eastern Wyoming for a number of years and I burned Ponderosa Pine in an Earth stove catalytic insert with no problems. It’s really pretty simple isn’t it, the wood, whatever type, just needs to be dry and seasoned.
Correct, they better bring Chuck Norris and Stallone if they want to stop me cutting something on my own land.
