Well, planting season is done and now on to replenishing our fuel supply.  Our Maple Syrup is still made using wood for the final cooking process.  The evaporator uses a full cord of wood every six hours of operation  so we will be cutting about 8 or nine full cords of wood to replenish what we used this last spring.  A full cord of wood is a pile of wood 4 feet high by 4 feet deep by 8 feet long.  We cut in the spring so the wood is reasonably dry by next spring. 

Many think that by using wood over oil we are more environmentally friendly.  I am not so sure but there are a number of reasons we still use wood.  Using wood forces us to clean dead and diseased trees from our woods which makes the woods healthier.  Rather like weeding your garden but on a larger scale.  Using wood also is a renewable resource thus making its use sustainable.  Visitors also much prefer seeing a wood fired evaporator rather than an oil fired one.  Some say the wood smoke adds flavor to the syrup but I don't subscribe to that.

Using wood does have issues, though.  It is dirtier in the sugar house with wood chips and bark around.  You get some ash from the wood that gets blown out the chimney and falls on the immediate surroundings of the sugar house.  I don't think using wood adds to air pollution any more than burning oil in the big picture but I doubt it helps at all at reducing air pollution.  It does create smoke right around the sugar house but that is not an issure as we have no neighbors. 

In the end,  I stick with wood for political and economic reasons.  I want to control my costs and resent being dependent on large corporations and foreign countries who together seem to make the price of oil go up and down like a yoyo!  Wood allows me to control that cost even though it can give me a backache at the end of the day from cutting it. it. 

Earth day is out in the country as well as the city.  You would think that our neck of the woods would be without manmade mess and that no clean up would be required.  Our problem is the dumping of others as they pass by our property.  The farm is bisected by a public road with no houses for a 1/2 mile in either direction from our homestead.  What happens is that regular joes decide they don't want to pay to dump their particular trash at the county waste facility or they just find driving over there too much work.  The result is they stop on our road when no one is looking and just dump their load.  We end up holding the bag figuratively and literally.  We get old building materials, old tires, discarded animal carcasses, litter and other goodies.  Earth day is a bit of a blessing as we have registered with the county as a participant group and therefore can dispose of all we collect that day for free. 

I am pontificatiing, but it would seem to me that trash disposal is rather like municipal sewage in that whatever you flush down the toilet is disposed of in return for your sewer fees.  It would be nice if that were true for trash.  If everyone shared the trash disposal costs as part of annual fees then trash disposal at the waste disposal site would have no on site fees and people would be encouraged to dump there rather than in the "boonies" where I have to pick it up and the county has to pay anyway!

We got a pretty small haul this year (which was pleasant) but I'll show you below all the same.