The woodpile

We live out in the sticks, where wood is a popular winter fuel.  It grows on trees, after all, and there are plenty of those around.  However, it needs to spend some time under the sun in order to dry out, so we maintain a wood pile to store and dry the wood.

Woodpiles are strange things; their entropy level is similar to that of a swiss watch.  You start out with a nice tidy pile, but once you start perturbing it by taking logs off it, it quickly collapses into a disorganised heap.  So we are spending some time re-arranging our heap, to prepare for the coming Winter.

The first step is to consolidate the old heap into a smart new woodstack.  Give that the ground tends to be damp, it's a good idea to make sure the wood is insulated from it.   I had some tin roofing sheet from the roof of the old shed, and I laid it out to form the base of the new stack.  (The old stack was built on wooden pallets that have all but rotted away.)   It will stop moisture rising from the soil, and water will run off it.  Then it was just a case of moving wood from the old stacks to the new one.

We ordered a new tarpaulin to go over the top, from Amazon.  It should be here before we get any rain. 

Meanwhile, there is another heap of oak that I collected with Leo a couple of years ago.  This has been resting on the ground, so the wood at the bottom will be damp, although the wood that is off the ground will be dry.   We took the dry wood and made a small supplimentary stack to burn this Winter, and the damp stuff we added to the new woodstack so it can dry.

Tip:  When making any kind of feature in your garden that is surrounded by grass, make sure that your mower can get to all the grass.  The old stack was too near the stone wall, so the grass was impossible to manage.