I got another load of firewood out & some more fence post cut up today. Some nice 4’-6’ chunks to cut up later or mill or make a bench. Whatever works. A couple piles of shorts, uglies & misc to throw in the trailer; it’s 4’W x 8’L x 2’H. Selling heaped trailer loads to folks with outside wood boilers for $100 I was pretty getting pretty hot & the buzzards were circling so either they were smelling me or it was a sign of things to come so I called it a day. I wheeled over to my folks place to hop in their pool & enjoy the back to school supper my mother was making for the grandkids.
So after doing a bit of sorting, splitting, stacking & working on wood pens. I measured what I have for Osage (not all from this job ), it measures out to about 25 cord plus whatever else is left on the current job. I figure I will have around 1.5 cord of uglies, end & pieces by the time I am done also. Hopefully within the next week or two I will be able to get this round of Osage wrapped up and be able move onto some dead Elms & dead Oaks before harvest starts.
That Osage is some cool looking wood. And it's on top of the btu charts I think? How long do those fence posts last? For firewood I bet that stuff will keep a house warm in -20 F type temps.
I have heard folks say that they can last over 100 years, I have some in my firewood in my stacks that I cut up from posts that were well over 50 y/o. No worries keeping the shack warm with Osage in cold temps, you just have to burn the coals down occasionally.
Really neat to see all these pics. It’s not something we have in New England, so interesting to see how it grows and how you’ve processed it. Well done!
I am making some headway getting the Osage split/stacked & the smaller rounds stacked. This pile is about 2/3 full of rounds 6” or less. I finished off filling in this stack. Then got moved over to a new pen. Still a good jag in the truck & my junk wood ( butts, crooks, twists, knots & generally ugly splits ) is overflowing my trailer.
Winds, yes. Leaning stacks caused by shrinkage, no. You can see where I have added & restacked in this picture. It folded 3 steel posts over, broke two of them & bent my panels. The panels aren’t too bad to straighten out. I brought a tractor & large round bale over to push on the stacks to square them up. The back two rows were leaning also.
Some great pics! I've burned a good bit of shagbark hickory but no osage. I can't imagine more heat output than shaggy. That stuff was .
I got the last load of firewood for now out today, I will likely cull about 15 posts out that I didn’t like the looks of; they will become firewood also. I have 2 piles of boiler wood, all the trees I had down are cut up. I ended up with 150 total posts but as I said I will give them a more critical eye & probably cull 15 or so. Today was quite literally rather a stinky day, my uncle had a cow die about 300 yards from the trees I had down & the buzzards were roosting on the trees I hadn’t cut up yet.
You & me both. I kept getting whiffs of dead animal when I was unloading & getting ready, I attributed to being down wind then I realized there wasn’t a my breeze. When the breeze did pick up I was still getting whiffs of it, the breeze was out of the east & the carcass was NW of me. So undeterred & trying to beat the rain, I proceeded cutting& rolling logs/post around then I wiped some chips off off my glasses & BOOM . I got a nice strong whiff of it. That’s when it dawned on me that those buzzards stench had been rubbing off on those trees.
I got all the butts/leftovers picked up this evening, it looks like I will have about 18-20 posts to cull out so there will be a nice load there too. If things work out this load of butts & the culled fence posts will be cut up & heading in a north westerly direction after Thanksgiving.
