Artful Firewood

Following on from my barn quilt and building post, I thought I'd show you something else I noticed while travelling.  This was particularly in Newfoundland (by the way, the emphasis is on the 'land', as in New-fin-LAND, it took us a while to get it and we were gently corrected a few times!)

Newfoundlanders need a good source of heat. It gets cold, like really cold! It was Springtime when we were there, and there were icebergs....need I say more?  Lots of houses use central heating with diesel, but lots also have a fireplace, or even a central heating furnace that uses wood.

And the further North we went, the more we saw of these.

Beautifully stacked firewood. If you live rurally, you can get a permit to go and cut your own firewood, and plenty of people do. Then they take the time to stack it in the most eye-catching piles.  I think it helps that the trees seem to grown straight and with not many branches (spruce?) and so they can cut them into these lovely rounds.

Which are particularly artful when you combine this year's fresh cut with pieces that are older and weathered.

And if you don't have time right then to chop them into fireplace sized chunks, you can store them in trunk stacks.

Or perhaps a tee-pee shaped stack is more your thing? I'm presuming this helps with rain run off?

Some people had sheds, but most just stacked it up in rows in their yard. You jam a pole in the ground at one end, stack a line of wood, almost like a fence and them jam a pole in the other end to stop them rolling away. Efficient and lovely to look at.

We saw them everywhere. On the beach even. That's Labrador in the distance. We were up on the Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland on the west coast and the Gulf of St Lawrence is only 18 kms wide at the narrowest point. The sea seems pretty calm compared to the wild east coast.

And out in the forest. I think this is a commercial cutter's stack. Still pretty!

Here's the messiest pile we found. And right behind it was a perfectly stacked line of wood, so I'm presuming this guy just went home for a cuppa inbetween stacks. No letting the team down here!

This wasn't actually firewood, I found it by a shed at the hunting lodge we stayed at, right next to a lake. I think it was old poles that had been a jetty. Still stacked nicely!

Our hunky, gnarly manuka and macrocarpa that we use in New Zealand just doesn't lend itself to this artful stacking. But we can aspire, right? 

Do you take care with your firewood, or is it all just jumbled in a pile under a tarp, or piled into a bin?