It can be hard to summon the appropriate motivation to cut firewood in early July. In light of this, I keep a newspaper article taped to the refrigerator that highlights the billion-dollar quarterly profits some oil companies are reaping; the fact that the Northeastern states burn about 5.5 billion gallons of fuel oil a year; that at $4.50 a gallon this sucks close to $20 billion out of our economy and sends it to Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Venezuela. This line of thinking keeps the woodpile growing and the furnace’s fuel-oil gauge pegged at three quarters of a tank.
I’ve been working in a patch of woods above our main sugarbush recently, cutting and splitting hard and soft maple, ash, oak, hornbeam, and white birch. The birch and red maple are destined for the evaporator, the ash and hard maple for the woodstove at home. The hornbeam rounds and oak will need another full year to season, and then they too will become home wood.
Managing a wood pile is a lot like what I imagine managing a baseball team must be like, as each species seems to have its own niche. There are stats to consider. In the case of the species I’m cutting, the hornbeam has the highest slugging percentage (24.6 million BTUs per cord), but it takes a long time to cure and it’s miserable to split. Stocking your lineup with straight hornbeam would be like using a power hitter in every slot in the lineup. And so I save my hornbeam for the clean-up spot. It’s a small enough tree that I can use most of it in the round, thus limiting the amount I have to split. I give the rounds a full year and a half to cure, and load the wood pile in such a way that in mid-January I’ll have power when I need it.
Ash has considerably less punch than hornbeam (21 million BTUs per cord), but it’s a fabulous lead-off hitter. Clear ash is a dream to split, and because of some physiological inner working that I only half understand, it dries faster than other hardwoods. Cut and split your ash in early summer and you’ll have a roaring fire come fall. Clear red oak might be even easier to split than ash, but the stuff is so dense and water logged that unless it’s a year old, don’t even try burning it.
As for hard maple, I view this species as the captain of the team; probably my shortstop. The one who hits 30 homeruns, bats .330, and steals 30 bases. It has almost a million more BTUs in it than ash, and it still splits fairly easily, having none of hornbeam’s prickly personality. (Speaking of prickly, don’t even get me started on black locust, the Barry Bonds of firewood. It leads the league in BTUs with just around 25 million per cord, but I’ve yet to talk to anyone who wants it on their team.)
The red maple and white birch are sugaring wood for a reason. They don’t have the BTUs to cut it as big league players (both hover around 18.7), but they’re perfectly suited for the evaporator and compliment the softwood we burn nicely. With sugaring, you want flash heat that you can control, not a big bed of longburning coals. At least that’s how this sugarmaker looks at it. Plus, we have a lot of red maple and white birch and we have to do something with it.
I know for a fact that I’m not the only firewood geek out there, so I’d be interested in hearing your take. Do my observations match up to your experiences? How about those of you who have lineups with other players in it? How’s beech to process? I hear it can be miserable, but I don’t split much of it so I don’t really know. What about white oak and shagbark hickory? Both of these species have enviable numbers and could potentially be the best of the best. Feel free to chime in too on the bad players. I cut an elm the other day for kicks, fully aware of its poor BTU content, and then had to recoil when the splitting maul bounced back at my face. It was like I hit the thing with the wrong end of the maul. What worthless firewood.
Anyhow, share your thoughts if you have some.
Discussion *