This week we went wood chopping in the forest not far from the village. My family in-law use a boiler powered by a wood furnace to heat their house. That’s why it’s important to collect enough wood in advance, so that it can dry out enough to be used for firewood in years to come. They own part of some land covered in trees and with the foresters permission they collect some every year.

A small group of us drove out in the morning and cut down trees in teams of two: One person saws down the tree and cuts it up into metre-long logs, while the other person carries the logs out to the road and collects them into piles. The others have experience using chainsaws, so I’m on collecting duty.

It took us until about lunch time to collect as much as we planned. Lunch in the woods means ham and sausage. After that it was time to stack the logs on the tractor trailer. It’s pretty clever how some tall, thin trees were selected as supports to extend the sides of the trailer and stop the huge pile of wood from toppling. The amount you can see on the trailer in the photo is probably almost half of what we collected that day.

Back at home the wood gets split and then stacked for drying and, in fact, a few years ago I wrote about the wood splitting part. The next day I had quite a muscle ache from stacking all that wood.