The best thing about January is the pink light in the morning and evening. Not every day, but often enough to notice. Sometimes it’s a vivid pink line on the horizon at dawn, sometimes it’s a general sort of pink glow. The morning I took our current banner photo, I woke up, looked outside, and had to grab the camera….. it still doesn’t really show what it was like…. pink light over white snow, looking like a pathway into the inside of a shell.

We saw the most amazing pink light in the evening a week or two ago, too. A pillar of light rising from the sunset, that we found out is called a sun pillar. Popcornhomesteaders were with us and wrote about it too…. I’m just slow. Here are different exposures of that evening….

It’s winter here, if we hadn’t mentioned that before. Late January, and we’ve had 12″ of snow on the ground for weeks. Yesterday it got above freezing (by about 1 deg), but tonight it is supposed to go back down to around zero F. Needless to say, we’re burning a lot of wood.

We’re blessed with a lot of dead trees, thanks to invaders. All our elms over 3″ in diameter are dead elms, thanks to the Dutch Elm fungus. It seems to preferentially infect the mature trees, so we get seedlings that sprout up and then at some point, Boom! it sweeps through the trees and hits everything it can. That blight killed off our elms a few years ago, and so now we comb through the forest and take down all the leaners (and a few of the standers) and chop ‘em up for the stove.

This past week though we tried ash for the first time. As a local family/friend affair, we went out to the farm and hooked up Belle and Shadowfax to the little sled (see photo).

Belle and Shadow lead the way

It was a typical winter day on the farm… a bit cloudy, cold and a whole lotta wind. The horse team took the sawing team out to the far wooded ridge in the photo, where they felled a dead ash tree. All our ashes are either dead or nearly dead from the Emerald Ash Borer beetle, who leaves little holes in the bark everywhere. The smaller ash trees are all dead, but some of the biggest ones are still hanging on by threads (at least our biggest one had a few branches that still greened out last summer). We’ve just found the elm so nice to work with we haven’t taken down any of our dead ash trees yet.

On this day, the human team wrapped a chain around some big ash branches and rolled an 18″ high stump slice onto the sled and the horse team dragged a thousand pounds or so of wood from the ridge back to the barn where this photo was snapped. Then the chopping team sprang into action cutting and splitting it into burnable pieces while Belle and Shadow headed back for another load. We worked all afternoon and took home three truckloads of cuts and splits ready for the wood stove. One family member stayed home… but then appeared right on cue at the end of the day with homemade soup and muffins for an incredibly appreciated warm meal, capped by a game of Settlers of Catan (and Cities and Knights, and the 5-6 player expansion pack) around the table after supper.

burning elm (hot!) in the wood stove

Oh, but about burning ash. We’re enjoying our ash in the stove, but it seems to burn quite differently than the elm we’re used to. Our elm burns well… so well that if we put in a nice load at the end of the day and turn the draft control vents way down while we sleep, the elm will all burn down to ash (no embers) within a few hours. In fact, here’s a photo of our elm burning hard in late December, taken in the dark… you can see the “reburner” vents jetting flames downward to increase burning efficiency. If we want any decent embers in the morning, we definitely have to get up in the middle of the night at least once and get a good full stove fire going again and turn down the draft again. Nothing wrong with this, we’re getting the heat from the elm into the house, but if we sleep past the point where the embers are viable it just makes it harder to get that fire going in the middle of the night when you’re freezing in your jammies in front of the cooled stove.

Ash on the other hand burns more slowly. Last night I stuck in a big load of ash around midnight and this morning at 6am it was nice chunky red embers, just fine for throwing in a couple snack sticks and a bigger log, shutting it all back up and letting it go, no fuss.

I looked up the wood heat content charts and most ash and elm rate about the same, around 20 MBTU of heat energy per cord of seasoned wood. So it’s not the AMOUNT of heat energy in the wood that differs, but somehow the SPEED that it burns. I think the elm just burns faster (and hotter?) in our stove and burns down more quickly, where the ash burns more slowly, leaving us nice embers in the morning or after a long afternoon working outside.

Anybody else see this difference between ash and elm? What do you burn in your woodstove?