Preparing for Winter with Firewood

A fun winter chore for our family is to collect firewood to heat our house.  We live in an underground house so we are well-insulated.  We can go all winter without turning the heat on if we keep the fire going.


The creek in early fall.



Because our soil is very heavy clay and very alkaline, the only place trees grow on our ranch is in the creeks.  When the trees die the branches flow downstream and into our fields.  Then we have to clean out the fields before we cut our hay.  So, by gathering firewood we are killing two birds with one stone- keeping the fields a little cleaner, and heating our home! 



The grass is so long, it's hard to see much, but this is where we gathered our wood.



My husband cuts up the dead trees with a chainsaw to make them more evenly-sized.  Then we pile them on the 4-wheeler trailer and haul them home.  It's a family event.  Even my 2-year-old likes to pile the wood up.  I take the baby on my back if the weather's nice enough.

We try to stack the wood neatly against our retaining wall.



Our wood supply covered in fresh snow.



This year we were super busy, so we didn't gather any wood until November.  Last year we had a blizzard the first weekend of October!  Luckily this year it stayed dry until we got some wood collected!  It's hard to gather wood that's frozen to the ground.  Now we have a stash to last us a couple months.