View 6 Our Milling Lumber Management for the Farm 8 Forest Proper woodlot management can generate fodder and income in addition to firewood.
8 COVER PHOTOGRAPH: ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/OLEH_SLOBODENIUK
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to Sell Timber From Your Land 12 How Before you decide to harvest and sell the trees on your
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property, review this expert advice.
Choose the Best Wood for Burning
Different hardwoods make for high BTUs in the fireplace, as well as a toasty house in the winter.
When to Choose Wood Heat
For some households, heating with wood is a smart, sustainable option. Learn about the benefits and costs of using a woodstove to heat your home.
Firewood At-a-Glance
Find the best firewood types for your needs with our handy BTU comparison chart.
Let the Chips Fly
Chainsaw safety is no accident.
Choose the Best Chainsaw for You
From clearing brush to bucking firewood, get the best model to meet your needs.
Choosing a Wood-Burning Stove for Your Home What to consider when selecting and installing a woodburning stove.
Avoiding Creosote Buildup
Heating with wood is a joy. Understand how creosote forms and your joy will also be completely safe.
Time-Honored Art of Splitting Wood 38 The Once you’ve mastered the following tools and
techniques, splitting wood by hand can be a pleasure.
Science of Stacking Firewood 42 The From Shaker rounds to ricks, here’s a primer on methods of stacking firewood for maximum seasoning.
With Wood 49 Heating A practical, and less expensive, way of keeping the
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homestead warm during the cold months.
Burn Wisely for Safer, Healthier Winter
EPA’s Burn Wise campaign seeks to reduce wood smoke pollution. www.Grit.com
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Picking the Perfect Log Splitter
Make free firewood from your woodlot or hedgerow using this handy machine.
The Art of Coppicing
This ancient technique lets forests produce timber without killing trees.
the American Chestnut Tree 58 Growing Wiped out by blight in the early 20th century, resistant
hybrids of the American chestnut are making a comeback.
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Home Lumber Mill: Crafting Dimensional Sawed Timbers Portable sawmills let you use lumber from your land.
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A Kitchen Island 66 Building Working with homemade lumber creates a beautiful focal point for the busiest room in the house.
to Make a Homemade Fire Starter 70 How A few ordinary household items can be combined to easily create a starter for your fireplace.
with a Portable Sawmill Business 72 Profit Learn how to generate money for the homestead by processing wood, custom cutting lumber, and more. 75 Homemade Solar Lumber Kiln
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If you’re into woodworking, take a step toward more self-reliant living by building this drying device.
Timber 82 Salvaging One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Shelter Building for Owner-Builders 84 Pole Save money by living in a pole shelter while building a homestead on your land.
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Maintain Your Property With a Chipper-Shredder
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Make your own high-quality mulch and compost with one of these tools.
Your Own Wooden Shakes 92 Make With just a mallet, a froe and a few other tools, you can craft a new roof for your house.
Grilling With Wood Chunks 94 Add another taste sensation to your next barbecue; avoid the charcoal, go with wood.
Resources 96 Recommended Places and people to help you find everything you want and need to know about timber.
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FOTOLIA/BRAD WYNNYK
Forest MANAGEMENT
Harvesting firewood is an important part of managing your woodlot, but with a bit more effort, you can get so much more.
FOTOLIA/PHIL SHEPHERD
FOR THE FARM Proper woodlot management can generate fodder and income in addition to firewood. By SAMANTHA BIGGERS
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imber sets – simply called the “woods” by most farm youngsters – are an integral aspect of country life. They offer wildlife habitat, firewood for heat, forage for animals, shade, wind protection and so much more. Often overlooked and thought of only in timber terms, there are multiple ways to create income from a small woodlot beyond selling saw logs. Here are some ways to get the most from your wooded acres – be it for pasturing pigs or harvesting the occasional whitetail deer. 8 GRIT’S COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE WOODLOT
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Pasturing pigs
If your woodlot is loaded with briars, vines and overgrown understory, pasturing pigs will help clear the mess out so grasses or more beneficial trees and plants can be propagated. We pasture about four pigs per acre of woods, but with more grain and the right soil conditions, you can seasonally keep up to 25 pigs per acre, depending on breed size and other variables. Or if you have a sufficient area of mixed eastern hardwoods, you can let one pig roam three to four acres all summer and feed very little grain. Folks lucky enough to have an orchard (or one nearby) might consider allowing
the pigs to keep the orchard grounds free of windfalls.
Grazing other livestock
While pigs are an excellent option because they root and clear space, woodlands can be grazed by any livestock. Goats and cattle are excellent options. Goats can be used to clear out growth that other animals won’t eat. Some breeds of cattle are better at eating the shrubs and such than others; our Dexter cattle will eat just about anything a goat would consume. Grazing your woodland will give you more pasture, and you should be able to market your beef, goat meat and offspring locally. Pastured meat commands a higher price in most cases. Laws vary by state for selling meat, so be sure to check the rules and regulations for meat inspection.
Understory crops
With no animals grazing, a diversity of plants can be cultivated in the understory of forests. In the more southern reaches of the United States, one might consider planting galax, ginseng, tea trees, or other medicinal plants. Decorative native shrubs such as azaleas or rhododendrons can also be grown and sold to homeowners or nurseries for landscaping use. Ginseng is by far the highest-paying understory plant, but it takes about six years to reach a marketable size. It requires a north-facing slope for optimal production. However, ginseng’s growing environment can be simulated. This plant grows wild as far west as the edge of Nebraska and as far north as Maine. You can grow ginseng by purchasing stratified seed or rootlets. Some farms
offer starter packages for growers that include rootlets and seeds. Tea trees are an excellent understory plant. Leaves can be harvested for green tea, pressed into tea tree oil – a common ingredient in many of the healthier cosmetics and cleansers – or cured for black tea. Processing tea is easy to do at home. There are many varieties of tea trees available, just make sure the variety you are getting is suited to your U.S. Department of Agriculture growing zone. Tea can be grown as far north as Delaware, or USDA Zone 6B. With the popularity and price of coffee and tea continually rising, growing your own tea can save a lot of money over the years, and you can sell cured teas.
Firewood
Dead or dying trees can often be more useful as firewood. Leaving a few standing dead trees to provide wildlife habitat makes sense for encouraging beauty through wildlife and a more diverse set of woods. But, if you don’t see any foliage on a tree, it’s best to make a decision as soon as you can as to what to do with the tree – weak or diseased trees can be more vulnerable to pests and parasites; diseased trees can also pose a health risk to other trees in your woods. If a tree stands for long enough, it will rot, so it’s often best to cut it down and stack it up for firewood as soon as you notice it
is dead. Firewood can provide an occasional windfall throughout the year. If a tree gets blown over in your forest, cut it into firewood. Good firewood is worth more than $100 a cord, and several folks in rural America make a significant supplemental income selling it. The quality of different types of wood will be region-specific, but typically Osage orange (if you’re in the Great Plains), red and white oak, hickory, ash and hard maples are among the best in terms of British thermal units (BTU – our measurement for quantifying the heat value of fuel). However, a type of wood with a lower BTU rating isn’t all bad and will still sell – for instance, hackberry doesn’t burn as hot, but some folks would rather cut, split and burn it over Osage orange simply because it’s easier to work with. Consider what wood you have, and then see how it ranks and how it’s priced in your area. You’ll also most likely need to season it for at least a year before selling it for the highest price.
Mushroom cultivation
Growing mushrooms is another way to use dead or dying trees. Many options are available depending on your climate. Perhaps the most commonly cultivated mushroom in woodlots is the shiitake. The shiitake grows best in hardwood, particularly oak. On WWW.GRIT.COM
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Choosing a WOOD-BURNING STOVE for Your Home This woodstove has been installed into a masonry fireplace as an insert. Woodstoves are much more efficient than fireplaces, and an insert like this could cut costs and help heat your home next winter.
By KAREN K. WILL
f you’ve picked up this magazine, you’re probably the type of person who likes to do things for yourself: You’ve taken steps to become more self-sufficient and rely less on big industry. With the garden in place and the livestock munching grass in the field, it might be time to turn your attention to the farmhouse and its systems, and explore some ways to become more sustainable there. Never before has the cost of home heating been so high. The price of nonrenewable home-heating fuels such as propane, fuel oil and electricity is surging due to dwindling resources and higher demand.
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FOTOLIA/JASON HARVEY
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KAREN K. WILL
What to consider when selecting and installing a woodburning stove.
When converting your home to wood heat, you’ll likely recuperate the remodeling costs in a few short years.
In hard times, we inevitably return to the wisdom of our ancestors. Before having access to electricity and propane, people chopped wood and heated their homes with fire. There’s nothing quite like the crackle of wood when it catches fire, the smell of smoke rising through the chimney, and the glow of embers on a cold night. A wood fire warms body and soul, the flames provoking thought and providing solace with the cold weather blowing outside our homes. And if those flames are capturing your imagination inside a woodstove, you’ll hear only their spit and snap – not the whir of your HVAC churning (i.e. the sound of money burning) to
keep your home comfortable. By choosing to zone heat your main living area with a wood-burning stove, you’ll substantially cut your fuel bills whether you buy wood, or grow and harvest it yourself.
or an entire home, depending on the size you choose and where you decide to place the stove. It also has the added benefit of being able to heat your home even when winter storms result in a power outage.
Stove efficiency
Types of wood-burning stoves
Compared to open fireplaces, woodstoves are incredibly efficient at heating a room. Fireplaces create ambience; woodstoves create heat and ambience. The usual home fireplace converts only about 10 to 20 percent of the wood burned to heat, whereas woodburning stoves commonly achieve efficiencies of 50 to 77 percent. A woodstove can heat a single area
There are three major types of woodstoves – circulating stoves, radiant heaters (“potbellied” stoves), and combustion stoves (“Franklin type”) – with circulating stoves typically having the highest efficiencies. Circulating woodstoves are doublewalled with an inner combustion chamber, usually made from cast iron. An outer shell of sheet metal promotes WWW.GRIT.COM
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life’s more enjoyable tasks. Even if you have never split a stick in your life, you can become an accomplished woodcracker yourself. To do so, you’ll need a few commonly available tools, the how-to basics, some rounds of ripe-for-the-opening wood – and practice. The instruments most often used for working up wood by hand are the single-blade splitting axe, a pair of three- to five-pound steel wedges, a middle-sized sledgehammer, and an eight-pound splitting maul. However, it isn’t necessary to have all of these tools to begin work. I recommend starting with a pair of wedges and the workhorse of the log-busting trade, the splitting maul (or “go-devil”). The blade of the latter implement will crack open many a billet, while the tool’s back end can be used for driving wedges. (By the way, never use the butt of an axe for pounding – its thin head may crack.)
The technique
The Time-Honored Art of
SPLITTING WOOD Once you’ve mastered the following tools and techniques, splitting wood by hand can be a pleasure. By LARRY DIAMOND
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here’s hardly a feeling in the world that is more satisfying than swinging a maul over your head on a clear, crisp day and watching it smoothly and cleanly cleave a round of firewood right in two. 38 GRIT’S COMPLETE GUIDE TO THE WOODLOT
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At first glance, chopping stovewood to size by hand may appear to be a ponderous, imprecise activity that requires little more than pure brute force. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Rather, there is a distinct art to splitting wood. The skilled woodsman or woodswoman who works with – not against – the
rounds he or she is handling can split a lot more fuel in a given time than some muscle-bound ox who tries to club the wood pile to smithereens. In fact, a great many experienced splitters (both chore-laden homesteaders and briefcase-laden urbanites) have honed their skills to such a point that they look upon billet-busting as one of
Probably the single most important wood-splitting rule is this: Always place your to-be-broken rounds on a short chopping block. Such a base will provide solid resistance to the blows, increasing your stroke’s penetration and guaranteeing that when your maul breaks through the billet, the tool’s blade will land in wood instead of slamming into earth or stones, which will dull the blade quickly. Once you have set your piece of tree up on its chopping block, stand back with your arms extended and feet planted squarely apart. (And, for safety’s sake, be sure to wear boots and durable, long pants.) Then line up the go-devil over its intended target, wind ’er up and swing. Now some folks go for pinpoint accuracy by lifting their mauls straight up overhead, while others feel they gain more power by swinging the implements back around their shoulders. And one person will let his or her top gripping hand slide up toward the
FOTOLIA/CATASTE DI LEGNO; OPPOSITE, FOTOLIA/ALESSANDRO CAPUZZO
The tools
EASIEST AND HARDEST TO SPLIT BY HAND EASIEST WOODS TO SPLIT
MOST DIFFICULT WOODS TO SPLIT
Ash Cedar Red Oak Pine Douglas Fir Cottonwood Beech
Locust Elm Maple Osage Orange Sycamore White Oak Elm
splitter’s head on the upswing, while another will keep both hands clenched together in a grip similar to that used by a golfer. You’ll have to experiment until you decide just which technique is best for you. No matter how you attack your billets, though, do try to let the weight of the maul do most of the work – gravity is your friend in this instance. In addition, be sure to hit the rounds flush: that is, with the go-devil’s handle landing at a 90-degree angle to the standing log. (You will probably
have to bend your knees slightly as you swing down to make a straight-on hit, but such a blow will definitely increase your splitting effectiveness – and help insure that, if your maul glances off to one side, the tool won’t swing down and strike you in the leg.) To develop accuracy, concentrate on aiming for as small a target as possible – and be optimistic when you swing. Don’t visualize your tool striking the top of the round and bouncing back up, but consciously think it down through the wood. WWW.GRIT.COM
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aw.
Wiped out by blight in the early 20th century, resistant hybrids of the American chestnut tree are making a comeback. Their rapid growth and productivity make them an excellent addition to any homestead. By LEE REICH
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Planning and early care
Chestnut trees need abundant sunlight (six or more hours of direct summer sun) and fertile, well-drained and slightly acidic soil. Generally, plan on giving a chestnut tree about 40 feet of room in all directions. If you’re in a rush for large harvests, plant at half that distance and remove every other tree when they start to crowd
SPECTRUM PHOTOFILE; OPPOSITE, SUPERSTOCK
Growing the American Chestnut Tree
he majestic American chestnut tree was once common throughout the forests of eastern North America, providing sweet, meaty chestnuts for humans and wildlife. A fungus first noted in the United States in 1904 quickly wiped out this native species, but fortunately we can still grow our own chestnuts today because the American chestnut’s Chinese cousin is resistant to the blight that devastated the American species. I planted my chestnut trees here in New Paltz, New York, in 1997. I had a relatively small area to devote to chestnuts, and, except for one tree, I chose grafted hybrid varieties that produce large nuts, are resistant to chestnut blight, and are cold-hardy (because the temperature here in New York’s Hudson Valley can plummet to minus-25 degrees Fahrenheit). The varieties I planted were Bisalta #3, Colossal, Eaton, Marigoule and Mossberg. Given suitable soil and site conditions, Chinese chestnuts and their hybrids grow quickly and start to bear at a young age – typically about their fourth year. My largest and quickestto-bear tree, now 12 years old, was actually grown by planting a Chinese chestnut. The tree has both a height and spread of about 20 feet, and it yields more than half a bushel of chestnuts every season. It’s a beauty, as chestnut trees generally are, with nice form and leaves that retain a fresh glossiness before turning a rich golden brown in autumn. Chestnut trees can be “luscious landscaping,” as long as they’re not planted where the sharp burrs that cover the nuts could cause problems when they drop.
Prickly, formidable burrs protect chestnuts, but they can also make harvesting chestnuts a thorny task. Chestnuts are high in carbohydrates, and while they are bland at harvest, spending a few days in the refrigerator changes some of the starches to flavorful sugars.
each other. You must plant two trees to provide the necessary cross-pollination, so, unless your neighbor has a tree that’s a seedling or is of a different variety, always plant two different varieties. Chestnuts are primarily wind-pollinated, so the two or more pollenizers need to be within about 200 feet of each other. Chestnut trees require little care beyond their formative stage. While they’re young, ensure adequate branch
spacing by training the trees to follow what’s known as the modified central leader form. This promotes growth of a single, upright main stem by pinching back, bending down, or cutting off any competitors for that top position. Select major scaffold limbs growing off the main stem, spacing them a foot or more apart up along the central leader. Scaffold limbs should originate from a spiral arrangement as much as possible so that no limb is directly above WWW.GRIT.COM
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tic film over the whole works. The air space between the glazing and the dark metal siding acts as a huge solar collector. My buddy does use an electric dehumidifier during the final stage of the drying process, but it serves only to speed things up a bit. All in all, I’d have to say that his pole-barn solar kiln is a real success.
FOTOLIA/FOTTOO
Dry, well-seasoned lumber can be used to build a great many things, from a house to a business to a tree house for the kids.
Recycle and save
If you’re thinking of building a kiln like mine, I strongly recommend that you take advantage of recycled materials. After all, the structure doesn’t have to be fancy – old barn beams and secondhand lumber will work just fine. And if you’re lucky enough to have a sunny, unused outbuilding of about the right size – or even a vacant southwest corner in the barn – it can easily 78 Grit’s Complete Guide to the Woodlot
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be retrofitted with solar panels to become an instant lumber-drying kiln. I have a friend who, after seeing how well my kiln turned out and worked, converted his pole barn into a commercial-size dryer that’s able to handle 50,000 board feet of lumber at a time. After painting the entire barn black, he nailed 2-by-4 furring strips vertically to the east, south and west sides, then stretched heavy plas-
Once I’d gathered all the required materials, I chose a building site and set to work, using treated posts for supports and placing the kiln’s floor 2 feet above the ground. A 121⁄2-by16-foot working floor space seemed adequate to me – the extra 6 inches of width allows me a bit of maneuvering room when I’m handling 12foot lengths of lumber – but those are the interior dimensions. The total floor size is 121⁄2 feet by 22 feet; the additional 6 feet of length extends beyond the south wall to support the bases of the solar panels. After sinking the corner posts, I went on to finish the floor, wall studs, siding (I covered all but the bottom 5 feet on the south wall, where the solar panels are located), roof frame, and then the corrugated metal-andfiberglass roof to cap it all off. My solar panels, built into the south wall, went up last. The Forest Service plans recommended fabricating the panels separately, then installing them after the building is completed. However, I believe it’s easier just to build the panels directly onto the kiln.
Solar panel construction
Most literature on solar theory recommends that collectors be slanted to the degree of latitude of the building site, plus 15 degrees. Using that formula, I estimated that 40 degrees would be close to optimum for my location. However, since the sun crosses on a lower arc in winter than it does in summer, I figured I wouldn’t be able to hit the correct angle on a yearround basis anyway, so I simply set the
FOTOLIA/LISA TURAY
Let’s build
With some building know-how and the proper wood, you can construct beautiful furniture for any room of the house.
collectors at 45 degrees. (Solar panels work more efficiently when slanted so they’ll face the sun’s rays at an angle as close to 90 degrees as possible – the more directly the light strikes the collectors, the less energy will glance off and the more will be absorbed.) I began building the sun-grabbers by nailing 2-by-4 wall studs – at 45degree angles from the south edge of the floor and 24 inches on center – to the top of the 5-foot opening in the south wall of the kiln. After that, I nailed the sheets of Masonite hardboard to the bottom sides of the angled 2-by-4 studs. The inner surfaces of my collectors were formed from a stack of 24-by30-inch flat aluminum sheets that I obtained from the local newspaper printer – the sheets are used one time, then either sold for pennies each or tossed out. I simply bent a lip on two edges of each piece of aluminum so they could be tacked between the angled 2-by-4s and supported by the hardboard sheets that were secured to
the bottoms of the 2-by-4 studs. With the Masonite and aluminum in place, I painted the exposed side of the metal, along with the 2-by-4 framework, flat black. Then I set the recycled storm window glass across the 2-by-4 studs and nailed a strip of wood across the bottom of each frame to keep the glass from sliding off. Presto! Solar panels – and they worked. Hot air began boiling out of the top openings of the collectors soon after the glass was laid in place. Unheated air enters at the open bottoms of the collectors, is warmed as it passes over the black panels, rises to the top openings, and then dumps into the drying room.
Experiment for improvement
Having come this far, I decided to experiment a bit to see if I could improve the efficiency of my home-built kiln. For starters, I placed inexpensive thermometers at the tops of two adjacent solar panels. They indicated that
the temperature of the air leaving the solar collectors was about 120 F. Since I recalled reading that a corrugated surface makes a more efficient heat collector than a flat surface – because it has more area to absorb heat – I modified a few of the aluminum sheets by bending them back and forth over a sawhorse. With this second-generation aluminum in place, the temperature of the solar-heated air rose a full 10 degrees. Needless to say, I removed and corrugated the rest of the sheets as well. The Forest Service plans specified that the top – or glass – portions of the panels be tilted in a peak-and-valley, or “sawtoothed,” fashion. The advantages of this arrangement had evaded me at first, so I had simply placed my collectors side by side to save time, materials and work. However, since my first experiment had resulted in improved efficiency, I decided to give the recommendation a try and see what, if any, difference it might make. I removed the glass covers from two www.Grit.com
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