Preparing "Heart Pine" for Kindling

I can remember when I was a kid on the farm.  From time to time, Dad would "bring new land" into the farm, meaning we would plant rice on a piece of land that had been fallow since, well forever.  Clearing that land was quite an undertaking.  One of the last things we'd do before opening up the land with a plow was collecting pine knots and heart pine.  We would pull a wagon through the field and toss all the pine knots on top.  Eventually we'd pile up the old pine somewhere.  This heart pine was the very center part of old-growth long-leaf pine trees.  It was resistant to rot and decay and insects.  It lasts forever.

I still have some and still use it.  We never hooked up the gas jet to our fireplace to start firewood.  Why do this when you have heart pine that you can split into kindling?  Below I'll show you how I did it the other night.

I use a double-headed ax that I sharpen up.  Cutting heart pine is not like cutting any other wood.  It is hard as stone.  I stand the heart pine on end and then commence to cutting kindling off of it.

I said heart pine lasts forever.  I may be exaggerating there, but there is really no telling how old some of this stuff is.  I want you to look at the photo below closely:

That old post is solid heart pine.  If you look closely, you can see an old, rusty hinge on it along with a dozen or so nails and staples that were all hammered into it decades and decades ago.  I'm sure it was not easy to drive nails into this wood.  I have that old post, but I'll probably never cut it for kindling.  I think it has a lot of character and longevity and speaks volumes about quality.  If you buy a "landscape timber" at a hardware store, that thing will begin rotting as soon as you put your turn signal on leaving the parking lot.  This old log of heart pine stands the test of time...

From another heart pine log, I carefully cut long skinny pieces of kindling.  The wood smells like Pine Sol and is sticky to the touch.  The colors of red, yellow, and amber are rich.  If you inhale the scent, it reminds you of simpler times.

I put these pieces in the wagon along with some firewood.  I'll put a stick or two of heart pine kindling on the fireplace grate and then put some dry firewood on top.  I crumple up a piece of newspaper or two and strike a match.  Fire consumes the newspaper I've placed under the heart pine and it quickly ignites.

The sap-enriched wood crackles, sending up billows of black smoke that coats the inside of the fireplace, ensuring that we'll need to call a Chimney Sweep to come and clean our chimney from time to time.  Heart Pine is an old relic from the past.  I'm glad I have a pretty good supply of it as its existence is growing rarer by the day.

Keep the Home Fire Burning!

Using Heart Pine To Start The Fireplace

This morning when I woke up the winds were briskly blowing out of the north and east with temperatures in the mid 40s.  This evening it was downright chilly.  I made a fire in the fire pit outside.  Prior to that, though, I was thinking about starting a fire in the fireplace in the next couple of nights.  I've moved a load or two of firewood under the patio for when we light one, but realized that I need to go cut some heart pine or lighter pine.

When we light fires in the fireplace, we always start the fire with a few kindling sticks of lighter pine.  I looked on the Internet to see exactly what heart pine actually is and it confirmed my suspicions:

"Heart pine," as it is referred to, is only long leaf pine. It was the main type of pine found in the old growth forests from Virginia to Texas. This type of pine is called "heart" because when it reaches maturity the tree is mostly heartwood. This is not true of other lesser specie of pine such as loblolly and slash. The original old growth long leaf pines grew to be 300-500 years old. It contains almost twice the resin content of other types of pine and had much much higher structural strength. It was used for the tall masts of sailing ships and was referred to as "The Kings Pine" when this country was owned by England. Much of this information and more is contained in historical record of the Great Southern Lumber Company in Bogalusa, LA. This mill was opened in the early 1900's and was the largest sawmill in the world at the time, producing 1 million bdft of long leaf pine per day.  Credit Link

Here is a big chunk of lighter pine that I chopped some kindling sticks off of today:

I have a stack of this stuff that I keep on hand for fire starting.  I wish you could smell how Great it smells by scratching the photo below!:

From looking at heart pine from the outside, it is unremarkable.  Hard, heavy and dull looking.  But when you split it open, it has an amber tint and is oozing with sap and bursting with aroma of pine.  In my scouting days, they taught us to take our pocket knives and carve little slits in a stick of heart pine on every side, opening it up like a Christmas tree shape.  Then you would light it and use it to start a campfire.

I can remember clearing land at the farm in Oberlin that was previously all in pine timber.  We'd pile up sticks to burn, but we'd put all the pine knots and heart pine that we would find on a trailer and would save it.  Many years ago my neighbor gave me a bunch of logs of heart pine that he had gotten from Georgia while on a job.  Each year I cut sticks off of the bigger logs and place it on the bottom of the firewood in the fireplace.  It starts very easily and pretty soon, you have a roaring fireplace!

Here's my bucket of cut up heart pine.  In a few days, we'll be ready to burn our first fire in the fireplace of the winter.

Can't wait!