Last summer and fall, Nancy and I bided our Covid-induced leisure time by sitting beside our goldfish pond sipping cocktails and watching the frogs and goldfish enjoy their new digs. But for the past 2 months, the frogs have vamoosed and our goldfish have migrated to the deep part of the pond and out of sight. That’s when we decided to spend our evenings beside the fire pit, or should I say the smoke pit.
Wet wood, or green wood, does not like to burn. It would rather just sit there and smoke. Our wood pile has two types of wood. Some really old, rotten stuff that will actually start to burn before you can put it in the fire and some newly felled limbs that I have sawed, thinking they would make great firewood, but they didn’t. When you put these logs in the fire they spit sap back at your face, and just sit there and smolder. When you go inside, your clothes smell like Lexington BBQ without the pork, just smoke.
I hated to order wood, since I had an entire cord stacked beside the firepit, but I wanted wood that would actually burn, so I asked Richard, our tree guy, if he had any wood – dry wood.
I remember back when we used our fireplace to burn wood (it’s now occupied by gas logs) that we frequently order a stack of wood from one of the guys who patrolled the neighborhood.
“Is this wood seasoned?” I asked.
“Absolutely,” was always the reply. Seasoned one day, maybe. It wouldn’t burn and smoked up our entire house.
Richard said he had some dry wood, poplar, and brought us what he had – enough for 5 or 6 good fires. Then I remembered a big pine tree limb that had fallen behind our house. Pine burns great, I thought, and I went out and sawed some up. The teeth on my chain saw are now welded together and I have a permanent layer of pine sap embedded in my hands. When I pick up my morning paper, I literally can’t put it down. It’s stuck with pine resin.
Even worse, the pine won’t burn, either. It is also new wood and spits sap.
I finally broke down and have been buying some of those wood bundles you see stacked in front of the grocery store, and they burn very well.
By next year, I’ll have a bunch of aged wood and enough for plenty of fire pit fires, but for now, I guess I’ll be buying log bundles from Kroger’s.