Improvised Kiln-Dried Firewood

A brainwave today has I hope made some huge lumps of ash burner-ready well in advance of their natural drying time. I was burning a load of old papers, credit-card slips etc, in our garden incinerator - one of those holey dustbins with a chimney in the lid. I balanced some of the big bits of ash on the top, turning them regularly to avoid them setting alight, though they still scorched a bit. The results are quite pleasing - the six pieces feel dry enough to burn without worrying about clogging the chimney with moist deposits. 

Don't for goodness' sake try this on the burner itself btw - I did an experiment, monitored very closely, and within a minute or so the wood on top showed signs of smoldering. Round the sides, a few inches away from touching the burner, is in my experience fine, though I always feel better keeping an eye on things. 

Years ago holidaying in a gite with friends at Easter we dried a couple of substantial logs at the side of a big open fireplace. Every night the other guy and I struggled to light the fire, to much comment from our wives. When we asked if they could do a better job on the last evening they more or less set a match to the by then dessicated logs which burst into flame as if soaked in paraffin. So drying's worth the effort. 

On Trees and Losing Them

Yesterday as we drove to our allotment we passed along a street where some fine old trees have just been cut down, trees with trunks a couple of feet in diameter. Our guess was that they had been removed because they were warping the pavement and trips and falls were filling the pockets of ambulance chasing lawyers. So the aspect of the area has been changed for the next several decades because of a fear of litigation. The street looks like someone given a razor haircut against their wishes.

Is it hypocrisy that one of the things we went to do on our plot was cut down a tree? In that case it was a pear, a substantial tree perhaps 20 years old, but that in our seven years there has only yielded one decent crop, in spite of much TLC - manure, sticky bands, pruning... Most of it is now in the allotment shed, one large bag brought home and put in our wood-store. That tree was also shading too much of our land, and our neighbours' land, and we had the foresight to plant a small cherry tree close by two years ago with the idea that the pear would go sooner or later.

Will the local authority plant replacements on that now bald street? Or will they think it too much effort (and cost, and future cost)? Their thinking about trees it seems is mainly what the possible dangers are, however unlikely: a few years back some other fine specimens, laurels of some sort I think, were removed from a park here because they were close to a children's play area, and the leaves contain a poison. After the felling it was pointed out that just to get a bit of a poorly tummy a child would need to eat several pounds of the leaves.

Death of the Ash

This post is not in any way meant to celebrate the forthcoming slaughter of the ash trees across the country as the dreaded die back fungus takes hold. The sad prospect of large numbers of trees being felled and then burned does prompt a question or two about what will happen to the wood. Does it have to be burned under controlled conditions? If so, what are they? Or will there be a sudden glut of ash firewood on the market? If the wood from trees felled to beat (some hope) the fungus does make it to market, will wood-burner makers see a sudden upsurge in business with prices for the fuel falling?

We have been given a portion of our neighbour's ash that came down recently, only fair as it came down on our nearly new shed. It is usable when green supposedly, though we intend other than with kindling to leave it  until next year's burning season. And it splits really easily, even huge slices across the bottom part of the trunk can be broken down with a few lusty blows of my somewhat blunt axe. Our greenhouse, empty at this time of year of plants, is currently full of netting sacks full of the wood in a variety of thicknesses, from chunks that will burn for an hour to kindling via firewood sticks, the hope being that the wood dries more quickly in there. It's an ill wind and all that.

Free Firelighters

Well, firelighters that are free if you prepare them while cooking a stew.

Somebody told us the other day that lemon and lime skins when dried out slowly make good firelighters. Sounds odd, but when you think of how hard a lime forgotten in the fruit bowl goes, it makes a bit more sense. We tried it, and it works a treat. One fewer thing  to compost, but free firelighters seems like a good enough trade off.

I have to remember two things here - one not to throw the juiced halves in the compost bin; two to put them in the oven when a stew is being cooked. Not too hard, and they smell better than those white petroleum-wax things too.

Wet, Wet, Wet

I visited Henry Rowntree on his farm near Gisburn today to do an interview - I have a piece to write for Lancashire Life on his Aberdeen Angus herd and his environmental work. The most sobering point we discussed was the effect of all this year's rain - he thinks it will be the worst since 1912 as regards rainfall. The marginal land where only grass is an option for farmers becoming less viable in such a climate, silage impossible to make when this wet, cows full with the water of what they chew rather than the good bits, tractors struggling to cope with conditions, and the need for grain on many farms to supplement animal diets - reducing in his view the quality of the meat.

We can be happy that improved earnings in the poorer countries mean improved diets, but competition gets stronger for the same food, extreme weather causes reduced yields, and the population rises inexorably. We need marginal land to remain productive in this country for food security, and for the look of our countryside.

Save the Planet, Wear a Hat

There are innumerable small things we can do to reduce our energy use (and thus costs, reliance on Russia and the Middle East, etc etc), thereby lessening our impact on the environment. It seems to me that wearing hats during cold weather is one of the easiest.

I bought a Scrooge-style nightcap for my father the other day, not in his case really for warmth, his house being generally over-heated, but for comfort - and it has helped him sleep better. As he is almost as bald as me, maybe it is something to do with keeping his head as warm as his duvet-covered body.



Our house is a tougher prospect to heat, being somewhat larger and having four rather than two storeys. The central heating here can be all on or all off, so rather than heat the entire house while my family is out, we have the radiators off in the middle of the day, and I wear a jumper. This is no sacrifice, it is cosy. If it gets colder I make sure the wood-burner is fired up to keep the chill off the place, and put on slippers and a smoking cap - quickly taken off if the postman or couriers arrive. If I venture out I wear gloves. This is not a difficult concept to master.

When did we start thinking that we should roam the home in shirtsleeves or less all the time? Pepys I recall (though I didn't know him personally) wore a waistcoat in bed until the spring weather arrived. It used to bug me travelling in the USA when I ran a company there that in summer the offices you visited were freezing, and in winter they were boiling, defying the elements and then some. When I drove with salesmen I wore a sweater to combat the aircon which was set at something Scott would have jibbed at. The attitude seemed to be deliberately wasteful of energy. Here in Preston I have noticed over the last couple of years that even in winter many men out shopping wear shorts or cargo pants, and women have jeggings and micro-shorts.



Is it too much of a sacrifice to don a hat and a woolly in winter, provided you have the means to own such? By not having the central heating on all day we must cut our energy bills significantly. Happily, unless I am imagining it, hats are becoming slightly more fashionable again. Or maybe people have cottoned on to how warm they keep us?


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Eco Houses and What They Bring

Grand Designs again. A house built on Skye, which would have looked fine on a Californian beachfront, or perhaps a Swedish forest, but on that island looked as out of place as humility on Boris Johnson's face. It was a fine idea, using clever new methods to ensure the insulation was as good as could be, the builder did a marvellous job, and it was eco in the double sense of being economical as well as environmentally friendly. Except it wasn't friendly to the visual environment, it stuck out like the proverbial sore thumb. Perhaps when the wood bleaches in time it will improve.

I like houses to be different one from the next. The worst place we ever lived was an 'executive estate' where the houses were pretty much little (or big) boxes, and the majority of the people wanted to be shut up in them, scuttling from car to front door in order to avoid social contact. Where we live now there are barely two houses alike, and the people are great - we had a fireworks party last night with a load of neighbours round. Not sure if there is any correlation, but our first home was in a similar area architecturally as where we live now, and again the people were in the main terrific. So different is laudable, desirable, but there are limits - and a wooden shed on Skye probably went beyond them. One truly positive point on that house, however: the architect had done a fantastic job on making the most of the views from within the house, the windows framing the best of them. Pity that from those same views his building would not have enhanced the picture in return.

On Keeping Warm and Solvent

Saturday saw me making an angry phone call from my bed - it was Saturday after all, and old habits like the lie in die hard (once you are through the getting up at five with sprog phase). Our energy supplier had notified us they were putting our direct debit up by 25% with nearly immediate notice. We were substantially in credit, and by their estimate only a rise  of 11% (11%!!) was actually needed to match the expected upturn in our energy usage over the winter. So I told them firmly the figure we were prepared to go to (after waiting 10 minutes on the phone with what amounted to aural torture every minute - if I had wanted to give them a reading wouldn't I have done so the first one or two times they asked?) and they were ok with that. Calculate £30 per month extra in their account earning interest x say 5,000,000 households and they would be earning about £500k per month from us all without doing anything much to deserve it.

That made us reassess our energy usage - all to the good - and go on a turning lights/TV/radio off campaign again. But more than that we are trying an experiment with reducing the time the heating is on (only marginally, losing about an hour a day) but using the wood-burner to boost the warmth of the house at breakfast time (and a fire is so comforting too) and for an hour or two beyond. The wood as other posts have explained is nearly free - a huge load of pine dried for the last two years cost £40 if memory serves, it will last the winter, and we have also cut and dried branches, boughs and now a major bit of next-door's ash tree that came through our shed roof when it fell. The fabric of the building is warmed by the burner, on the bottom floor of four so the chimney conveys some of the energy through the other three.

Piously it also makes me think of those who can't use such a strategy - no means, or strength etc. There are few things more miserable than being cold and damp. While we can continue with this we shall, provided it works. Money is not that tight, but I am. As the one in the house in the middle of the day it affects me most, and I'll happily work with my smoking hat on and even a cravat or scarf if needs be. Louche meets bloody silly.

The Fragility of Self-Reliance

For me self-sufficiency is a myth, as to play a full role in modern life - wear decent clothes, enjoy the benefits of any electronic device, use the most effective medicines etc - we rely on wider society. What many people mean by self-sufficiency is growing most of their own food, better expressed as self-reliance. We are happy to grow a small percentage of our own food: we have hens for eggs, and an allotment that provides a large proportion of our vegetables from say June to mid-October, plus beds in the garden for herbs and additional veg, especially salads. But we are far from self-reliant and certainly not self-sufficient.

The dangers of such a path have been emphasized this year by what has happened to our fruit harvest. The combination of a dry spring and horribly wet summer and early autumn, with frequent damaging winds, has left us with barely a fruit on our two cooking apple trees, nothing on the eater, nothing on the cherry, nothing on the pear. The cobnut bushes produced a less than exciting 100g of shelled fruit, made into pesto and long gone already. If we had chosen a true peasant existence we would be done for.

A Dead Summer and Dying Trees

Is it coincidence or causality? Over the last couple of horribly wet months we have lost a tree, an old fruitless fruit tree that one day we noticed was gradually tipping over; and last week our next door neighbours lost two thirds of a huge ash - both thirds making our garden, the first taking out a bit of fence and scaring the chickens, the second utterly destroying the roof and severely damaging one wall of a year-old shed. Amicable discussions ensued, a new shed will replace it and we trust a piece of fencing. A month back a silver birch two doors down had to be removed before it toppled.

I wonder if the sodden ground accelerated these losses? And if the run of four or five wet summers here caused the rot to set in? This is a lovely leafy area, but becoming less so as such trees are lost. We have planted a quince, Victoria plum and greengage, but they will take a while to become established, and many years before they have anything like the architectural impact of the ash and the birch.  Maybe they never will, as the fear must be that this weather-pattern has set in and the ground will be this way off and on for the foreseeable.

It's an ill wind, however. Ash may not be the hottest-burning wood, but you can just about use it green, and we have room to dry it out - our neighbour is very happy to leave us the use of the wood that fell into our garden. So more bloody wood chopping, but later more wonderful warmth and warm smells from the stove in the dining room.

Death of a Chicken

A few weeks ago we (my wife and son to be honest, I'm too squeamish) killed one of our chickens which had not been laying for ages, and was starting to show signs of discomfort. That was less sad than the death last week of another of the original three birds. She had also stopped laying, but seemed ok and we were content to let her carry on. Then out of the blue I opened the hen-house to collect the eggs and found her dead on the laying box.

My environmental side says both birds were wasted (we couldn't bring ourselves to eat the one killed, and naturally wouldn't cook the one that had died), but another part of me found it rather sad that the one that pegged out overnight was found where maybe she had been trying to lay an egg, something long since beyond her. There are plenty in the workforce who in a way will meet the same fate.

Tebay - the Services You Enjoy Visiting

For Lancashire Life and eventually Meat Trades Journal I visited Tebay Services today. Is there another motorway service area in the UK you can actually feel good about (and after) visiting? In my past life I pounded the arterial roads, and had a policy of where possible avoiding motorway services, as they smell of grease, panic and corporate ignorance - Tebay being the honorable exception now as it has been for years. 

Family-owned, with a real (as opposed to convenient) commitment to local produce, it is cleaner, friendlier and more imaginative than the competition. Even the people visiting seem a different crowd. And bless them they have a butchery - no surprise when you find they were originally and are still farmers, their place supplying the beef, lamb and mutton and very fine the display looks to. Next time I am so tired I have to visit another services I will feel a tiny bit unfaithful.

Fishing from Fleetwood

The eco side of my character wonders about fishing as a hobby, albeit a very occasional one. But the sea is a fantastic resource, if treated properly. Last Saturday Joe and I joined a fishing party on Blue Mink off Fleetwood, last minute space fillers for a club where two members couldn't make it. We go every year at least once with the brilliant Andy Bradbury, skipper and owner of the boat. I've used such services elsewhere - Anglesey and Rhos among them - but he is by far the best.

In terms of value for money how do you rate enjoyment? It cost us (me) £80, and we took home a large Bull Huss prepped by the skipper for me, two plaice, and two dabs. Not economic in terms of food on the table then. But all cooked and eaten that night, and there is nothing as good as really fresh fish. Had we wanted, and possessed the skill to skin them, we could have eaten dogfish aplenty. But we didn't and don't. Pity, as they are everywhere. When I was a kid in Gorleston rock salmon as they were euphemistically called featured on the chippie menus, and was a favourite with my mother. A very tasty fish, as was the Huss - the first I can recall eating: it was softer than dogfish, if my memory serves, and had a distinct crabby-sweetness, really good.

The value, though, is probably in the pleasure my son took in the day (7 - 3), landing the first fish, catching I think the most fish (not bad given we were with guys who go on the boat every month, sometimes twice a month), and having a prolonged period in the fresh air (for which read away from texts, X-Box and similar vices).

Word Gets Round, Like My Stomach

Though our garden is thoroughly secluded our next door neighbours must have noticed me cutting lopped branches into wood for the burner, as they offered me the stuff left by a tree surgeon who sorted out a few of their unloved apple trees. It's a pity that the burner is sealed as applewood smells lovely on an open fire.

Cutting wood is about the only exercise I do these days, but it makes me want to do more as the lift you get afterwards - all those endorphins doubtless - is great. Sunday was spent cutting out-of-place branches from the fruit trees on our allotment, sawing worthwhile bits down into more firewood. Trouble is for all it is a great heart-pumping-muscle-straining-aerobic-workout it gives me a healthier appetite than normal. Add to that it was Mothers' Day so a special meal was called for, any calories burned replaced and then some. Eaten outside though, which in mid-March is pretty wonderful. My patent kale-and-everything bruschetta, lentil salad with the remains of Friday's daube cut into it, a ripe tomato salad, roast chicken with potatoes done beneath it plus PSB fresh-picked, green salad to mop up the juices and bought in cheesecake to finish. Plus two half bots from Adnams. Would have needed to fell a whole tree and turn it into firewood to nullify that lot.

Bob's a Lumberjack

Talked with old friends on Saturday. They live in Keswick, and a few months ago invested in a wood-burner. Nothing terribly new about that, but what was interesting was how they fuel it: they bought a permit from the National Trust that allows cutting firewood in certain places, with strict conditions - no power-tools, for example, and pretty obviously only trees already felled for the purpose.

By my reckoning if thicker branches etc don't get used commercially, as many won't, they'll rot and produce greenhouse gases without us getting the benefit of heat from them. So at least three cheers to the NT for what is I think a pilot project, and one with imagination and sense. Fuel, exercise, fresh air, and helping keep the forests tidy, plus some income for the organisation (think they said £120 but won't swear to it).

Ready to Grow

Weekends in theory are meant to be for chilling out, but given Ruth is rarely happen unless we are actually doing something we just spent Sunday getting ready for the coming growing season. Part of that was more wood-chopping in the garden - a few dead boughs and the odd one that had got too big and shady being cut down, sawn to length for the burner and split so it will dry well. The greenhouse that was full of drying wood has been emptied ready for the plants it was bought to house, and partly cleaned up, and our propagator and a zillion seed trays disinfected ready for the seeds that will in turn fill the greenhouse.

Strange that so much activity - interspersed with buying seed potatoes for the allotment - should have in fact been relaxing.

Wood Warms Three Times

There is an old saying which has it that wood warms you twice: the first time when you saw and chop it; the second when it's burnt. I count a third, the warm feeling you get from thinking about that free fuel and the value of the exercise. As regards that last point, I find the gym boring beyond words, hate jogging as a pointless (and in terms of joints damaging) torture, but can spend hours chopping wood in the fresh air. Not an all-over fitness regime, but it ups the heart rate and my arms are in fine fettle.

We had built up a huge pile of old branches dried under a tarp beneath the now sadly unused (and rotting) tree-house. Over January I have reduced that pile by half, filling bags now kept in the greenhouse (until it is needed for growing stuff) and the shed. The driest, and ash that you can use pretty much off the tree is included in that, has been burned. Carbon neutral as it would rot and give off gases otherwise, it is not a fossil fuel. I'm leaving the twiggier stuff so that any hedge-hogs hibernating at the bottom will not be disturbed, but come spring will sort that too and use the space for stacking the cut-to-size split logs and bags of kindling. As eco here means economy as well as ecology, I reckon the 11 bags of big stuff and five of kindling would have cost about £75 from the local dealer. A gym membership would have set me back about £25 for the month, so we are £100 ahead of the game.