I split rounds in half all the time and leave them to dry as is. It works great. Now I don't do this with rounds that are much bigger than 8-9" in diameter. I do this with elm a lot.
Deciding to split your rounds in half is a decent percentage of the battle. If you do halve them, your drying time does speed up. Same as quartering them. You decide what works best for you. If it takes such a grunt to lift a round and wrestle it, it’s best to split it. Having used the hand width loosely to determine if a round should be split or not, it helps if you’re not wanting to use that wood for awhile. If you begin splitting logs that are best destined as solid good splits, why not just work on the uber-sized logs and then use your own judgment on your unsplit rounds and Experiment? If you got the wood to wait on for awhile, go for it...
Split it to manageable size to move and make it fireplace size when you can i When i was cutting from my honeyhole id buck to fireplace length then half/quarter/sixth rounds to load them and get home. Other scores ive had the luxury to process there, then move the wood as fireplace sized splits. The more exposed wood the faster it dries. A ten inch round split in half will season more than the same left as a round. I personally dont remove bark from wood unless its loose already. A lot of the wood ive scored this year has been party seasoned so bark came off most of it. I personally prefer "green and clean" fresh cut wood, but have started to like barkless as ive gotten an education from the forum.
This might not go here- and not to disagree with Brad, just to draw a distinction between the differences of opinion and personal preference, I do in fact prefer to remove the bark, especially when it is shaggy and more fibrous. I dry them out and use them as fire starters. I have been a little on the lucky side, because I haven't had to buy any kindling or otherwise make it out of splits by chopping them finer and finer. I don't go crazy with it, but if the blade of my maul can easily peel back the bark off a round, I do so and put to the side to dry- as a side note connecting back to what the OP was asking, if the bark peels off easily, I've found that the wood tends to split easier.
I single stack rounds in my pole barn until it gets cool enough for me to start swinging a splitting maul. They lose a significant amount of moisture. Obviously they dry faster the smaller they are split, but rounds do undergo significant drying. Do the best you can when you can.
Primer on Woodburning by Backwoods Savage You will find some good information by reading this. Of course if wood is not split it will dry slow. It will dry over time and how much time will depend upon what type of wood it is. Naturally the softer the wood the sooner it will dry but this proves to be true whether you split it or not. In your case, if you don't have time, it would depend upon if you were home or not. If at home, I'd for sure take the time to completely split it. If you have to haul it, I'd simply haul the rounds and split when I got it home and when you had the time for it. Just remember, it will always take more time to handle that wood twice rather than completing the job all at one time. There are some rounds that we do not split but that is limb wood that is so small it is not worth splitting and they will still dry; just a bit longer to do so. What we do for firewood is normally to cut in winter; split in spring and stack immediately after all the splitting has been done. This way we have to get the splitter out only once per year. Sometimes it does not work out exactly that way (in our case because we've had some get-togethers in the spring so wood gets cut then and sometimes we still have some splitting and stacking to do later). But, usually we have the wood all stacked by May 1. We leave it until late fall or early winter then top cover it. Then it sits in the stack 3 years or more before it gets burned. It works out wonderfully and we use probably half the amount of wood we'd use if we tried to burn unseasoned wood. btw, we also stack it off the ground a bit but not very high off the ground; sometimes only a couple inches. Here are a couple pictures I've used several times for a good example of how we handle our firewood: First we cut in late fall or early winter. We move the wood from the woods to where we want to stack our next wood pile and just sort of stack it like below. When the weather turns really cold we stop cutting and take the rest of the winter off. Usually by late March or early April we get started with the splitting. Immediately after splitting we get started with the stacking. We usually stack to about 4 1/2' high. Once the stacking is complete, we just let Mother Nature do her thing to dry the wood. This is the last of the wood pictured above. Usually in October we move enough wood for winter inside the barn so we don't have to mess with the snow and ice. Getting wood when having to fight the snow and ice can be interesting so that is why we move some into the barn before the snow flies. btw, in that last picture you can see our log splitter covered with a tarp. Fortunately we now have a place in the barn for that so we don't have to cover it anymore.
I use bark for fire starter also, never spent anything on fire starter. Usually the bark will come off on its own as the wood is drying. I keep four bins of the stuff and that usually lasts me a winter.
Say, your splitter is snugged up next to your stacked wood. Just wondering... do you just move your splitter along the stack or do you bring wood to your splitter, keeping the splitter in the same spot?
When I can't reach it any more, I simply move it ahead. When that row is done I move it close to the next row and do it all over again. It is easy to move so one can easily do it by hand rather than using a machine. I might add that I also always have a pickeroon with me to help if it is needed but I don't reach very far.
Well, in years past I've had as much as 7 years on hand and had no problem remembering. Shoot, I used to be able to recall which tree different wood came from but as I age, that is not happening quite so often.
