COOKING WITH WOOD

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If at all possible, select and harvest the wood yourself. While this may seem an unnecessary chore, take my word for it: starting off with the right wood will make fast and easy work of the entire rest of the process.

When venturing out to the harvest site, keep in mind that smaller trees are easier to fell and to handle ...from carrying the pieces to splitting the blocks. Also, cutting your wood to stove length now will mean a lot less effort when it comes to cooking later on. Make your fuel 2 inches to 2 3/4 inches shorter than the distance from the front to the back of your stovebox. You can always feed in shorter pieces, but anything much longer isn't going in. Knots, bends or whorls in the wood will also affect the fit; work with nature to your best advantage. If a piece of wood is too) knotty. use it for the fireplace instead of the stove

Often, even when dealing with the high-quality lengths of wood. you'll need to cut out bad patches. Be sure to make square cut so that when you set the block up to split, it will stand up plumb and present you with a perfect target.

Ah, to split wood ...just the feel of it I prefer a woodyard with a low and high chopping block (the high block is often easier on the back. especially when the work calls for repeated swings of the ax).

A friend, Peter Gott, showed me his trick of the "two wheelbarrow" method. He puts one wheelbarrow to the right and another to the left of his high block, so that he doesn't have to reach to and from the ground to gather and place his wood. As he cleaves the pieces, they fall naturally into one wheelbarrow or the other and are ready for rolling to his cookstove stacks.

Another key consideration is the thickness of your stove wood. You'll want most of it to be about 1 3/4" x 1 3/4" although some larger pieces for slowing the burn and some smaller pieces, for picking up the fire are also important.

Cookstove Comeback

Anyone who has ever tasted bread fresh from inside or a stew straight off the top of a wood cookstove will tell you eating just doesn't get any better. But when, early this century, electric (and later, gas) ranges brought speed and convenience to the kitchen, most folks were more than happy to sacrifice a bit of flavor for the knob-turning ease of these modern appliances. Aside from a brief surge in sales spurred by the 1970s' oil crisis, the market for wood cookstoves dwindled steadily. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, most retailers had stopped selling cookstoves, and many manufacturers had eliminated them from their product lines.

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