I was maybe moving firewood into my basement for the last time this burning season and noticed something strange in the stack. I had Black Locust mixed with Poplar. Obviously I wasn’t putting much thought into this stack. What was I thinking mixing rare BL with Poplar? There’s some peculiarities I noticed throughout the winter with split size also. I had some stacks with jumbo long burn splits and I had some stacks where I was making pencils. Maybe I had a backlog of logs and was in a rush to get it processed. Maybe I had some nice straight logs and ample time to whittle toothpicks. Just some weird observations I made through the winter while selling and burning. I had one customer grumble about getting a load of skinny splits. I told him it’s the luck of the draw. Some folks like em small and some like em big. I try to mix it up, but sometimes I ask myself, what was I thinking when I made these splits. There was one 1/3 cord stack of oak where everything was no bigger than 3x3. TBH I wish I had poplar mixed in every stack. It just lights up like paper, which is ideal at this time of year.
Interesting observation. How old are those stacks in question? I find myself almost always making splits the same size so much so I really have to concentrate when I'm making bundle wood splits which are sized smaller. The last couple times working at my "Disney" thread I worked the dual splitter. He sizes differently depending on the species. Semi seasoned and green oak get split smaller like a 2x4. The beech wasn't. Kinda hard for someone like me to have to refocus every time!
Probably a good mix of wood to burn. If you’re “stuck” with a lot of BL coals, couple pieces of poplar would work well to burn them down. And pencils are always nice to have to pack in each overnight load. You were actually on to something when ya made those stacks.
The stack is 3yrs old. I remember the Poplar, because it was a tree I felled in my yard. I forgot I had any BL, just like the Sugar Maple stack behind it. Earlier this winter I encountered a vein of Elm I don’t remember processing. It was obviously green when I split it.
I’ve noticed that most of my red oak splits are 3x3 or 4x6 for some reason. I keep it separate from the ibc totes. Same with poplar, have a whole pile of it separated, just mentioned to the wife yesterday when I brought down a tote of wood, that is probably the last one before swapping to poplar for evening fires. I’ve learned to keep a small stack of poplar in the garage as the wife likes to use it to start a fire, I like to keep her happy. In this years wood somehow I mixed in a good sized basswood tree, not sure what I was thinking at the time…
Split size is a dilemma sometimes. I keep an axe and splitting stump by the stack on the front porch to make smaller splits if needed.
I've burned a bunch of elm this year that was processed prior to getting a splitter. At that time the standard for split elm was whether it would fit in the stove or not. This year I took many splits that were less than ideal size, off the stack to be resplit.
Same here, and conversely scraps so comically small that leave me scratching my head why I thought they were worth the effort in the first place. I came across some buried mulberry limb wood this year like that.
I like a mix of big n small so it just depends on the log and what looks to be the best/easiest way to split it up, which includes size, and shape (triangle, or square/rectangle) but yeah, some parts of the stacks certainly have a bias one way or the other... I think it depends on how long I had been splitting for the day, as far as being tired/over it, or not too...they tend to get bigger as the day wears on I do believe.
