Firewood stacks of Mahringen – pt II

 

Temperatures have dropped to around -4C during the day and minus something larger at night. Time to go for a walk and complete my study of the firewood stacks of Mahringen.

 

This stack is farmhouse sized. The wood appears to be split to half cord length for drying. The construction of the end of the stacks allows them to resist the outwards pressure. I don’t suppose this would work so well for wood cut to firewood length.

 

The solution to a rectangular pile of cut firewood appears to be the ’4-Poster’ – my term for it. The 2 posts on the end of this garden pile of firewood are clearly too small for the job. But the cunning bit is a wire strung along the pile from end post to end post about half way up the pile which provides a very simple self tensioning of the stack. A single wire suffices for a single row of firewood and two wires for 2 rows – I think this one might actually have 3 rows of wood. Hope  I’ve described this well enough – but I plan to try this out as soon as I get back and have the opportunity to cut and stack.

 

The process is less uniform than I expected. This local apparently prefers to split his softwood after it’s dried, and this has to be the neatest round wood stack I’ve seen in a long while.

 

Also in his garden is this stack of planked Birch wood. Waiting to make bee-hives. Another good use of birch that I need to add to my list.

 

Short of space? How about the wooden garden wall approach to the firewood stack? Needs to be neat enough to pass muster of course.

The piece de resistance is this set of what I can only describe as  log silo’s which appear to be made from sections of steel grid used for reinforcing concrete structures.

 

Not entirely clear how the silos are accessed to be emptied with the snow deep on the roof.  IT may be that there is an opening towards the centre of the set of 4 silos.

 

Plenty of shed based solutions to the firewood stacking as well.

 

Even the small branch wood is neatly stacked for kindling wood.

 

I think the extensive use of softwood as fuelwood makes the firewood stacks a lot more noticeable than in the UK since they will be twice the volume of an oakwood stack – though I did see plenty of hardwood as well.

But perhaps the biggest difference is that people who use fuelwood take more responsibility for source, seasoning and storing their own firewood rather than calling their local firewood merchant to delivery a dumpy sack of firewood on the drive when the stocks get low.

Apparently around here many people buy a licence to cut firewood (or clear brash) in many of the large civically owned woodlands – something of which I fully approve, and used to be possible in the UK until the Forestry commission stopped the practice claiming ‘liability issues’ – perhaps the forced sale of some our civically owned woodlands will help to restart this approach. Though of course I fear that the opposite might happen instead.

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