As a kid I was taught the light weight wood that dents or can drive a screw into easily is soft. The wood that is difficult to dent, or requires a pilot hole to screw into is hard. Kimberly, I too use the term to boot with the same intention... To Boot, this entire part of the country uses softwood for burning and we all stay warm Not sure but I have to wonder if its all the same work in the end between soft and hard. Soft is lighter and dries faster, hard is heavy and longer dry times. Interesting.
I guess it is a trade off; it takes time to cut and split although the poplar is easier to cut, less work on the saw, and is easier to split. I split some dead locust today and it took longer because of the splintering; sometimes had to use the axe to cut them loose. So there is more work at times in the harder woods but then they burn slower with a higher BTU output so you have to load the stove less often. As HDRock states, burn what you have.
Average pickup holds a third a cord.. 60x3= 180.. not bad at all for cord wood. I can get 2.5 cords (a smaller dump truck) load of slab for 150. Haven't bought any lately tho.
That's tossed in wood. Tossed in is about a third less dense than stacked so it's a pickup bed size. Sides are lower. About a 3rd a cord. Maybe a little under half a cord.
Under a half cord. It's tossed in. Don't bee fooled by the size a pile looks. It needs to be stacked to really tell. Your ave sized pickup can hold maximum 1/3cord. My brother was fooled. He saw a guy had a full sized pickup and a 10 x8 trailer piled up like that and he paid for "the cord". We stacked it and it only measured 3/4 cord at best.. stacked wood takes up much less space than tossed wood.
It's all about density per cord and space. If you have lots of room for pine then that's fine.. less storage to toke, better get oak. It's really all the same. I'd rather haul oak than pine though. It's the cost of processing too. It's more economical to process hardwoods. More energy packed into a smaller area. As in terms of work expended it works out to be the same in the end I think.
Sunlight is mainly responsible for greying. Water getting in and sundrieday out will really check it up quickly. Within a year or 2. I have kept oak under roof for 4 years fresh split and looks new. The wood ( oak locust and maple and butternut hickory) I had racked outside for a couple years gets dark and grey on the ends exposed to shade and a light shade of grey from sun side..
This reminds me of some graphic work I did once for a site I maintained. They were throwing a barbeque so I took a few photos of some barbies and combined them to get the style grill I wanted. Then I converted it to look like a drawing using some predefined filters. Then I created smoke coming up off the grill into the air and had it formed the words, "Cook Out" or something similar. It looked really nice and I spent some time making it. I got exactly zero comments on my work. It was also completely volunteer work, no pay compensation at all. I think I used it for examples when applying to a graphic job. I showed the original photos, the combined, conversion and then the final artwork. No reply. If you don't have a graphic design degree they ignore you.