The Pragmatic Wood Pile

I’ve heard it said that the best kind of wood to cut for the wood stove is the kind of wood you’ve got enough of on your woodlot. The best kind is also the kind you can manage with low risk and relative freedom from pain. And so see here my unmanly pile of arm to leg sized, light weight, safe and abundant SPICEBUSH, Lindera benzoin.

Now you’ll not see many true-macho wood piles with much if any of this small tree species in it. GUY WOOD will consist of hefty rounds of oak and locust, cherry and hickory–thick, heavy body wood worthy of a 15 pound splitting maul, a strong back, good hands and a spit on the ground.

You’ll never see spicebush listed in the BTU per cord charts of common trees for heat. But a pound of wood is a pound of wood for heat content, it just takes a bigger piece of some woods like poplar and pine. But spicebush is as dense as hickory it seems to me, heavy, hard and solid.

It grows in abundance along Nameless Creek where it follows the old rock wall along the edge of the pasture. There, spicebush splays out in clumps of up to a dozen muscular “trunks” in a single cluster. Out of that, one or two are typically three to four inches across and up to a dozen feet long.

And more often than not, when they get that size, they begin to lodge over into the creek or otherwise obstruct an opening like a guard’s gate and invite themselves to be trimmed back to the base and tossed in my truck. It takes a while to get a load of “coppiced” spicebush, but it can be done in about two hours of cutting, loading and unloading behind the house where this picture shows two spicebush loads on top of some maple from way back in the fall.

Spicebush yields the small to medium sized stuff we use the most of unless temps go down and stay down in the twenties or less. So I’ll stack most of this over beside the shed and find it there dry and under cover this time next year when a big chunk of oak would be too much, a handful of twigs and cardboard would be too little, and a few arm and leg sized sticks of Spicebush would be the Goldilocks JUST RIGHT.

Oh, I should mention in my reminiscinces of firewood past and present, it was a year ago just about exactly today that I had my close encounter with a falling tree that almost won me a DARWIN AWARD.

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