I Garden In Flip Flops: Winter Wood Supply Stacked, Covered, and Dry for Outside Boilers System.

My husband started working on our winter wood supply last March. The way we were raised, you start on winter early in the spring. You can never be too ready for winter. It takes continually checking inventories, short term and long term planning. I do help some with the wood, if it is warm, and he helps with my garden.

We have an outside boiler system that is really super efficient. We thought it would take at least ten years to see a pay back, but it payed for itself after 2 years. We installed it the summer before energy costs soared. The brand of this system is Hardy. It is surrounded by a water jacket and the water is heated and pumped underground through pipes to 2 buildings, our house, and supplements our household hot water usage. We heat 3000 square feet with it.

There are three stages to his plan, first immediate use, back up, and the next season wood supply. Cutting, splitting, and stacking has to be done by July because of the extreme heat here and then start back to work on it the last of September. It is recycling trees. There is always someone calling that has a downed tree to be cleaned up, a woods they have logged, or a fence row they have cleared out. We never just go out and cut down healthy trees. We utilize waste wood.

With the drought we have just gone through I hate to see how may trees may be dead next year. Floods, drought, harsh weather is just Mother Natures way of correcting things.

As you can see by the pictures below our grass is just pretty green for December. We have had some cold night and a couple of snow flurries but prolonged cold has not arrived. Next week is supposed to change that and winter is supposed to set in.