The Miracle of Bark

My wood stove setup is not the greatest.  The stove itself is nice: it's a Hearthstone Shelburne and can keep my 1400 square foot house reasonably warm in Georgia.  As the picture in this post shows, the chimney is not very tall.  It's about 12 feet at best.  It's apparent that it doesn't draw strongly.  Once the fire is roaring, it draws in enough air and burns well.

Sometimes when it doesn't seem to getting off to a very fast start, I throw in some bark.  Much of my firewood is oak, and the bark usually detaches as it dries.  A lot of hardwoods are that way.  It burns extremely well.  It very reliably improves the burn.

 In the picture above, the intensely burning area is a few small slabs of bark, with a sweetgum log on top.

This is a closer view.  Oak bark does not burn for long, but it's not a flash in the pan.  It burns long enough to get split wood (or an unsplit small piece) burning aggressively.  Throwing several sheets of bark into the stove at once heats the stove up to about 400 fairly readily (stove top temperature).  Although 400 might seem low, the max is about 600 and soapstone stoves seldom get above about 350-400).

Bark also functions well as kindling.

All of this may sound counter-intuitive, and some people dismiss it as being useful, because bark resists flame.  This is definitely true for small pieces that I throw into the stove with bark intact: the fire has to be going somewhat well for that to work.  It takes a few minutes to burn through the bark and get to the wood underneath.  However, when off the original wood (split or otherwise), the bark by itself does burn well.  Contrary to what a lot of people have indicated, I haven't noticed that it leaves more ash. It may...but I never use enough for that to be apparent.  I have never fed a fire nothing but bark, although I have enough of it that it could be done.

Oaks have good bark and some other hardwoods do.  Wood like cherry and peach has very little usable bark, but it burns okay, too; it's just paper-thin.  Southern pines don't have too much bark to them, and it often doesn't seem to separate, but western pines sometimes do: ponderosa pines can have very thick bark, and very old douglas firs can have bark up to 14 inches thick (though trees of that size aren't likely to be often used for firewood).

Bark works.  It's a reliable go-to.

Filtering Water

So my well has some issues.  It's an old bored well, i.e., wide and shallow.  As I've noted previously, there's often sediment in the water (actually, there's always sediment, but sometimes it's a noticeable problem despite nominal one-micron filtration).  The refurbishing done on the well last year was intended to mitigate the periodic sedimentation problem, but it has become apparent that when there's heavy rain in a short period of time, that can cause water to enter the well bore from the bottom fast enough that it stirs up sediment.  My location got about 24 inches of rain in the first 2 months of 2020, including 6 inches on one day.  So I've gotten a couple of bouts of stirred sediment.  The picture of the dog bowl shows what it was like when I wiped it out during a particularly cloudy time.

Another issue is bacterial contamination, also as previously commented upon.  Although guidelines say that filtering water through a certain depth of soil (this source suggests 10 feet), in actual practice it seems that they are still susceptible to contamination even if deeper.  I had an inspection of the casing done, and it looked pretty good all the way down to the 40+ foot bottom.  Nonetheless, I have had recurring bacterial contamination issues, and chlorine shocking is a major pain.

Ultimately, I'll probably drill a well, that is less likely to have issues.  In the meantime, I have set up my Berkey.  I got a Royal Berkey a few years ago, but had never used it.  I was not sure it would really work.  One can find all kinds of claims and counterclaims about the black Berkey filter elements.  Berkey itself says they have silver in them, which is helpful, and various lab tests are available (others question those).  So I set it up, primed the filters (a challenging task when the source water is known to be contaminated), and then ran a test. 

The filters worked: no bacteria.  However, when dumping turbid water into the top, it does clog up the filters fairly quickly--very quickly, actually, depending on the degree of turbidity.  If you have visions of using pond water in a Berkey and drinking what comes out, that might work out okay in terms of purity, but get used to dismantling and scrubbing the system frequently.

The filter element at the top has been cleaned, and the bottom hasn't (yet).  I didn't use the paper towel to clean; I used a scrubber sponge.  A lot of silt is still visible at the very bottom of the filter; I'm not cleaning there because I don't want to detach the element from its base.  That would basically ruin the filter.  This degree of fouling happened within just a few gallons when the water was bad.


Otherwise, the filters work okay, although don't take the throughput claims of Berkey too seriously.  Even when primed, they won't filter anywhere near as fast as suggested, unless the top reservoir is kept topped off.

This picture shows what the top tank looks like almost 24 hours after filling: it has processed most of the water, but not all.  I don't fill the top reservoir to the absolute top, and am getting about 1.5 gallons per day through the system with one refill per day.  It's faster when the elements are first cleaned, then eventually slows to where not much gets through the elements at all (maybe a half gallon per day or less), at which time they need to be cleaned again.  There's room for two additional filters, which would speed things up, but the same cleaning issues would remain.

So it does work, but it's not exactly the most convenient way to get water when compared to just turning the tap.  My well does have contamination issues, but most coliforms aren't really harmful, and I'm not having any GI issues when showering in what my well offers up.  Nonetheless, a more permanent solution is forthcoming.

A Winter Whole Wheat Loaf of Bread

As I noted last winter, in my new/old house, it's challenging to get bread to rise when it's below 70 indoors.  Here's what a recent batch of 100% white whole wheat dough looked like after "rising" on the counter for about eight hours:

As you can see, there's essentially no rise to it.  I put it in the oven on the proof setting for about 3.5-4 hours, yielding this:

That was enough to start baking.  The end result was a very respectable (if slightly underbaked) 100% whole wheat loaf.

Within a month, this should all be moot until fall.

Dealing with Pines, Continued

Last summer I posted about removing a bunch of volunteer pines. It was hot sweaty work on a black flag day.  Later in the summer I cut a bunch more.

To my dismay, I saw that some (not all) of the pines have coppiced, i.e., they've sent out sprouts around the former main stem.  They're down but they're not out.  Glyphosate may be called for once things start growing again in the spring.

The biggest of the trees I cut down last summer were about two inches in diameter.    Shown below is one of the bigger stems.

This size is easily manageable with loppers.  When pines are neglected for a longer period of time, it's a different story.

I have some pines that, unnoticed by me, have grown up too close to a pole barn and they are now threatening the structure (or actually damaging it).  They have been growing on the back side for the most part.  In the years since I've had the property, they have grown to something twenty feet tall and up to eight or nine inches at the base.  These trees are more like 14-16 years old.

Felling them has not been too difficult so far, but things are crowded in the area where they are growing, so some have to be dropped and removed to make room to cut down others.  They were big enough that I wanted to buck them into firewood-length pieces as I hauled them out.

 Once they were on the ground, I used the Stihl chainsaw and timber jack to part them out.

You can see that the one growing closest to the back of the pole barn was so close I had to cut it off a couple of feet up from the ground.  At the base there wasn't enough room to get the chainsaw bar behind it. You can also see that the needles still look green and reasonably fresh--even though this picture was taken a couple of months after the tree was cut down.

Once the main stems were cut into 18-inch pieces, I hauled them out in a wheelbarrow.

The work is still ongoing.  I plan to split them into firewood; although pine is not highly valued in the east compared to hardwood, it has some value.  As previously noted, I also have a lot of tulip poplar on deck for next winter.  It is not much higher on the BTU-per-cord chart than pine (and may even be lower; some sites indicate that southern pine yields over 20 million BTUs per cord, which approaches 80-90% of what oak provides).  Some suggest that pine causes heavy creosote deposits--the rounds above exuded drops of sticky sap along all of the ring lines soon after cutting--but if seasoned and used in a hot fire, it can burn as cleanly as anything else.