This is a story of warmth! From the sturdy Beech and Hornbeam to the stove which provides hot water and central heating in our house................

In the forest that overlooks our home in Pastwiska, there is a great mixture of trees from Scots Pines and Silver Birches to Oakes and Ashes, they all have their different purposes but for the best logging wood there is the Beech and the Hornbeam, hard, heavy and long burning.

Heat from Trees

It may be sad that such great trees are felled but in order to keep the forest alive it is necessary to have a continuing programme of felling to give space to trees to allow them to grow and develop fully. If this did not happen the trees would suffocate and die, so the cutting down of trees is of very great importance.

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Once felled and cleared of their branches high up in the forest these great trunks are hauled to the river valley where they are laid awaiting sawing up into 1 metre lengths and stacked 1 metre high.

The logs are then sold by the cubic metre an easy and quick method of calculation when they are 1 metre wide and 1 metre high! There is no preference to size of log but the tree varieties are separated into different stacks. The normal method of collection from this central point is tractor and trailer with our trailer being able to carry about 5 cubic metres at a time. But on snow covered and icy, heavily rutted tracks accidents do happen!

So the logs are transported to home, the trailer being off loaded and the wood stacked.

This is 15 cubic metres stacked once again.

Then comes the job of splitting the logs which makes them manageable and easily handled on the saw bench where they are cut up into four pieces and tossed onto the pile.

Even then some of the logs will be too large to fit into the stove, so these have to be chopped into smaller pieces. Whilst this is happening the pile gets ever bigger!

So from the tree standing proud high up in the forest to the humble log at home to give us warmth.

How grateful we are for those trees.

It is then a matter of moving the logs to where they are going to be stored for two years before they are dry and usable in the stove. To move them we use a hand cart built for the purpose and it is then an easy matter to move them anywhere in the courtyard.

This year they are being stacked under the eves of the barn in the place where we have been using the logs we stacked two years ago this winter. Note the dog kennel is purpose built!

Then once these logs are dry as those that we used this winter they have to be taken from the stack back into the hand cart and this time put in the cellar room by the stove where they are piled and await the burning.

The stove is a remarkable piece of equipment and fed properly will give us warmth and hot water just as we want it.