My coppice is not nearly big enough to suffice my needs for wood, so I have to buy some. When I was employed in a well-paying job, I bought mostly wooden briquettes. They take up little space, and they are a lot less work all year round, but they are also expensive. These last few years, I have more time than money, so I am buying wood scraps from making palettes.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

I wrote about this before – this stuff is four times cheaper than briquettes or ordinary firewood (and about six-eight times cheaper than natural gas would be), but it is a lot of work. A lot. I bought 6 tonnes, and I spent 2 months sorting, bagging, and piling them up. And now, in winter, I have to spend a lot of time and effort carrying it into the cellar. Which, funnily enough, I was able to do even when I had trouble with my sciatic nerve. Go figure.

Normally, I use about 3-4 tonnes of wood throughout the whole winter, supplementing it with 1 tonne of briquettes in the coldest months. This year, I would like to forgo the briquettes completely because the money is really tight. Which is not going to be easy…

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Looks nice, doesn’t it? So idyllic and peaceful, the garden covered in a blanket of pure white snow, the calm air, the quiet.

Yeah, about that. This was taken today, after I woke up from a sleepless night due to wind rattling the whole house, and after I spent an hour cleaning the walkway from the garden gate to my house and from the house to the greenhouse. An hour later, everything was covered in 1 cm of fresh snow again.

This is an ordinary winter, something we haven’t had for a few years. We had some frost and snow last year, but nowhere near enough to what we used to have when I was a kid. This winter started early, and we have freezing temperatures nearly continuously for several weeks now. I could calculate it precisely (I have a weather station), but I won’t (yet) –  I estimate this year’s winter is about 4°C colder than the last one so far. Up to today, I have burned through 2,5 tonnes of firewood. Only 250 kg were from my garden, because this year I was not harvesting the coppice; I merely trimmed the hedge and cut a few poles here and there for beans. At this rate, I might burn through the whole 6 tonnes of firewood that I bought last year.

As far as gardening goes, this is actually a good thing. Snow cover means the soil won’t be parched straightaway, early in the spring. Long, consistent freezing temperatures should do a real number on the spanish slugs, as well as a lot of other pests that migrated up here from warmer climates in the last decades. The mice and voles should be inconvenienced greatly, too. And if I burn through a lot of wood, I will get a lot of wood ash to sprinkle on my vegetable beds for potassium and calcium supplementation. And to kill the slugs that I survived the winter.