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!

Gathering Materials for the Barn Expansion

We're building an expansion to our barn, adding two "lean-to's" on either side.  Last week we showed how we put the four 4x4's on either side of the barn that will serve as the supports to hold up the roof extension.  Saturday was the day that we circled on the calendar to get things started.  I woke up at first light and drove to the farm in Oberlin to gather the building materials that Dad had offered to me for the project.

I like things with sentimental value and/or things with a story.  Here is a story (or two) about the raw materials we're using for the barn:  The wood we'll be using for framing up the roof is from a very tall and straight pine tree that was struck by lightning many years ago at Mom & Dad's house where I grew up.  The 5 acre property had numerous pine trees.  My brother and I had a Honda Z50 mini bike that we would ride.  We had a game where we'd throw pine cones at each other and try to knock each other off the mini bike.  Crazy, I know.  These weren't the pine cones that are open, but the ones that are tight and hard.  One time I knocked Kristian off the mini bike with a pine cone and he picked up a pine knot and knocked me over the head with it and knocked me out.  Who knows?  This pine lumber could very well be from the same tree!  Now when people ask me what's wrong with me, I can say I've been hit in the head...  At least I have an excuse!

Back to the story: Dad called a gentleman who was our crop duster pilot.  He also had a portable sawmill and cut up logs on the side.  He came and cut the tree into 2x4s and we stacked and dried it.  The lumber sat for years in the shop.  We're now going to use 58 of the 2x4s to construct the barn lean-to.

Now we'll also use corrugated tin for the barn lean-to roof.  At the farm we had an old pole barn that we called the "Combine Shed."  We stored the combines under the shed to keep them out of the weather.  As hot as it ever got during the summer months, for some reason, it always was cool and shady under that barn.  Over the years, hurricanes and thunderstorms ravaged the old shed.  It has fallen and its remaining structure is hidden behind the tall grass below.

Many sheets of tin from that barn, however, were stacked up.  I'll be using that tin for the roof.  The tin has many holes where it was nailed up to the rafters of the combine shed, but I'll patch them with caulk and it'll work just fine.  I worked as fast as I could Saturday morning and loaded the old cattle trailer with lumber and tin and made my way back home to begin the work.  A carpenter was meeting me to begin construction.

We had perfect weather to begin this construction project and I'll tell you about it tomorrow.