When you heat with homegrown firewood, you're perpetually on the lookout for dead trees close to home. This massive specimen is just at the bottom of our goat path, meaning we have to haul the wood home by hand but the journey is pretty short.

We'd been saving the snag for a particularly cold winter, but a freak windy spell knocked down one big branch and moved us along on our harvesting journey a bit prematurely. Before the nice, dry wood could become saturated in our swamp, we set out to cut it into haulable lengths and then turn it into firewood.

Mark sawed and I carried, and soon we had the whole mass up at our chopping station. Our electric chainsaw is a perfect fit for this kind of project since you don't have to struggle to start a bear of a saw for a few cuts. We did only get one segment cut to length, though, before the battery hit the recharge point. I'd say one more charge will let us finish the job.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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