The Science of Wood Stacking

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It works largely the same way today, except that much of the work is automated. High-powered skidders and logging trucks can harvest and transport whole trees to be seasoned and processed in the yard. Logs are aged whole and then sectioned to order with a big cordwood saw, split with a hydraulic ram, and moved by conveyer belt into trucks with one-, two-, or four-cord-sized beds that will dump the wood in your yard. It never sees a cord-sized pile. Modern wood merchants have been known to sell air, charging exorbitant prices for little ricks or full-cord prices for face cords that measure 8 ft long and 4 ft high but are only one stick deep. Some years ago, many states passed laws defining a cord as 128 cu ft and imposed fines on merchants selling air for the price of wood.

Wood is often sold wet and green — right off the stump — or aged for just a few months. While seasoned wood sells for $100 per cord, green may go for $80, so you can save money and make splitting easier by seasoning it yourself. (See Gail Damerow's instructions for telling aged from green wood .)

Stacking at Home

Whether bought or grown at home, wood should be stacked so it will continue drying. Give the wood as much sun as you do your garden. Wood stacked in the moist shade will never dry. To encourage air to move through channels in the stack, orient sticks so that the cut ends face the direction of prevailing wind or air movement. Local winds are variable, but in most of North America, weather systems move from west to east, changing all of the continent's air every three days. Lacking a steady prevailing wind, orient wood so that cut ends face west — into moving air.

In hilly terrain, the air will flow up and down the hills or along the valley floor as the sun warms it each day. If you are a hunter or naturalist, you know that deer bed down for the day on the ridges, then travel uphill at dawn so they are informed of danger ahead by scent carried on the cold and dense hilltop air falling into the warm valleys below. Then at dusk they come down to feed and water in the lowlands, facing into sun-warmed air rising up out of the valley. Try to orient the woodpile with cut ends facing the directions the deer move.

A woodpile is a public thing — as much of a "statement" as your garden or your mailbox or the vehicle you park out front. In my up-country Maine town, they say that a reliable, hardworking man will stack his wood square and straight, while a slacker stacks sloppily. If a pile weaves, wavers, or leans out of plumb, its builder is suspected of a need for eyeglasses, of tippling, or worse. Know those old wives whose tales are famous? Well, when their daughters reach courting age, they gauge the marital prospects of a man by the way he stacks wood. Weak and insecure men (too timid to get far) build a low stack arranged by log size — heavy logs on the bottom, little stuff on top. The socially or politically ambitious (they're all crooks) stack high and show-offish with big logs on top. The lazy (who never will amount to nothin') leave their wood in a heap or start a pile but never finish. And the sly and mercenary (watch yer virtue and yer pocketbook) stack ground-fall tree limbs and apple tree prunings in with the wood. If you want to keep your psyche to yourself, stack as the sticks come out of the pile.

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