I LIVE WITH A COOKSTOVE AND LOVE IT

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Green wood is wood that hasn't been cut too long. It's full of moisture and quite heavy. Dry wood has been cut long enough to dry out. It's quite light and burns rapidly.

A good formula to follow is: For quick heat, use tinder dry; for standard baking, use year old wood (dry); and for a slow, steady, long-holding fire, use nearly green wood.

Green wood is usually added after the fire is really going good. You'll soon learn to mix green and dry wood too. This gives a "just right" fire for most any kind of cooking except deep fat frying which takes a blaze "hot as hell". For this, you need all dry wood and the damper tightly closed.

One of the most difficult things I had to learn—or rather, not forget—was to keep the fire box full of wood while cooking a meal. I would be cooking away and—suddenly—my french fries were just "sitting there" before I realized that I hadn't fed the fire recently. This, of course, is a must so you have to make like a railroad man and keep "firing that ole boiler".

I get up in the mornings an hour before I am ready to cook. This gives the fire a chance to "do its thing" and gives me some quiet time before our little ones are rip and about. When the fire is ready, I have everything prepared to cook.

WOOD SUPPLY

If one lives on a tiny place or has no scrub timber to use for firewood, there are solutions. Almost any farmer or landowner will allow you to cut scrub timber from his place, clearing the way for more pasture and tillable land. The only requisite is that you pile the brush neatly or take it with you. This, too, can be used for firewood if broken or chopped and piled.

If you live in the vicinity of a sawmill or lumber yard of some sort, there are always. discarded strips and shavings that will burn. In Louisiana, when we don't want to go "pine knot huntin"' we visit a nearby box factory where scrap lumber has been piled many feet high. This scrap burns great.

As I walk in the woods of Louisiana and the Ozarks I see what amounts to literally truck loads of rotten, dry limbs and felled trees. In Europe, this would be a goldmine since many a serious livelihood is earned by gathering such wood and peddling it to townspeople for fuel.

There's no need to invest in a noisy chain saw for your wood-hunting expeditions. If you want something more traditional, less expensive and quieter, try a crosscut. You know . . . the long, two-man saw that you pull back and forth until the tree is felled. I've been on one end of such a saw and it's a splendid body conditioner. If you can't afford a saw you might do as Thoreau did: Borrow one. Just be sure you return it sharper than you found it . . . again, as Thoreau did.

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