In preparation for the first firing I am gathering and splitting wood. You can see two bunches of split wood in this post -- one is a pile and the other is stacked under the woodshed. It is a mixture of oak, hickory, pine, poplar and cherry plus a bunch of small pieces of dressed wood for my side stoke hole. They say that wood heats you four times; once when you cut it, once when hauled, then when you split it and when it burns. I would add a fifth time: when you stack it in the south in the summer. The good thing about wood firing in the south is that we will never run out of pine in my lifetime. My neighbor Dave brought over an oak tree from his son-in-law's yard with his front loader that was about 30" in diameter in places. It gave me a new appreciation of tree service workers. Now on to glazing!
