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.
It does look nice from the point of view of someone not dealing with it. We live about 115 m above sea level (it’s difficult to see the contour lines to be sure) and are in an odd spot that rarely gets serious snow, even when all around us does, but . But we used to live at 200 m above sea level and that made a lot of difference in the amount of snow we got -- we also lived half way up a hill and I have a vivid memory of the driver of the bus I was on stopping for my bus stop by bouncing the near front wheel off the curb repeatedly because if he’d just braked as normal the bus would have just gone on gently sliding down the hill! We also spent a year living at 300 m and would get enough snow to stop all but serious 4x4s with snow tyres moving around until the gritters and snow ploughs came though. It makes doing anything outside hard work. I do realise that compared to the kind of snow people get on continents my experiences are mild, especially as as a child I spent a winter in Michigan and the amount of snow was incredible to me, but as a child just fun.
Impressive, really impressive.
Sometimes I’m happy that I live in a tiny, downtown, apartment.