The processing wood video

I do a lot of wood processing at the woodland and it never occurred to me to that some of you may find it interesting enough to watch how we're doing for 2023!

Last year I processed the firewood at home. We’d load up the car with rounds at the woodland and drive it home where I debarked and split everything in the back garden. As lovely as it was, it made a right mess and then I’d also have to cart a load of bark back to the woodland.

We also didn’t get fully stocked until August, which meant that we had to buy in some firewood. That’s a kind of a hard pill to swallow when you have a woodland and so this year I wanted to do it a bit sooner and have all the firewood stacked and drying for the end of June. Even that’s cutting it a little close for getting it dry. As we’re mostly burning birch we should be fine because birch dries out quickly. The small amount of oak we’re burning comes from trees that have been dead and off the ground since at least storm Arwen. We’ll be well within the “less than 20% moisture” required by the “ready to burn” standard - I’d be surprised if the moisture was higher than 10%.

So this year we invested in a panther debarking chainsaw attachment tool and a cheapo second hand chainsaw to run it.

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It gets the job done though. So far it’s working a treat. Everything is debarked quickly (if not a little loudly) and split and stacked on site ready for us to pick up and carry back to the car.

There is a saying that firewood warms you three times. Once when you process it, once when you move it and again when you burn it. There’s a lot of truth to this statement as well as some embedded hints as to the time of year you should process firewood. So for winter 2024/2025 I’m starting the firewood processing as soon as the leaves drop this year.

Even in early May I was very hot processing it and the air temps were about 8º

1. The chainsaw is a total beast to start and often when it does it just dies. I sense I need to fiddle with the high / low and idle settings on the carburettor.