How to keep warm and fit in 9 easy steps.

1. Post a message on-line asking if anyone has wood to chop on a 50:50 share.
2. Get a reply from a lady who says "yes, but you might want to have a look at it first."
3. Go to the woodland to see 6 acres of devastation where various contractors have clear-felled pine, bulldozed it into huge piles and left it to rot.  There is also a lot of dead oak standing about looking precarious.  The wood is on a steep hillside.
4. Turn up with a handsaw and a billhook and start work sawing down trees and sawing up trees.
5. Get a "bit tired" and decide to call it a day, then spend another half hour carrying the metre long 10 inch thick oak logs to the car.
6. Ask the time and discover you've been working at it for 4 hours non-stop, which explains why your arms ache a bit.  This is one of many advantages of refusing to have a clock - you get more done and you turn up on time for everything*.
7. Split the sawn wood 50:50 with the lady who is surprised you didn't use a chainsaw.
8. Come back with a mere metre cubed of logs.
9. Eat a whole packet of pasta, finish the wine and go to bed.

Yes, it's Mount St Helens, but it gives you an idea.  Just add a goat or two.

It would take us about 2 hours to chop the wood down the chemin (see earlier post), which yielded about a metre cubed, so taking travel time out of it and having to give half away, it works out the same.  It would be better, of course, if we could just chop wood in the huge woodland at the bottom of our field but the owner has a reputation for being a bit of an arse...

Oh well, still beats a gym subscription any day of the week.  Except when it's raining.

*Not having a watch means I always over-estimate how long I will take to get somewhere and end up on time, whereas if I had a watch, apart from constantly looking at it for no reason, I would think I could leave and get somewhere in half an hour and would be late because something would inevitably cause a delay, like a bus driver having one of those mystery tea breaks exactly half-way to your destination where he stops and reads his paper for 15 minutes while being perfectly aware that everyone on the bus is wanting to get to work/is bursting for a pee/is trying to catch a plane/etc.  I got the earlier bus and am now having a cup of tea with plenty of time in hand in a mock-Italian/American cafe with loud upbeat music, quiet downbeat clientele, drinks in paper buckets and pastries for giant people.

The morning routine

The commune's hedge trimmer (6 circular saws on a tractor) has been busy down all the country roads here and left a bit of a mess. It's the farmer's duty to clear it up but he's too busy so he said "elp yourself", so we have been. Two hours a day in the morning before it gets hot, totally peaceful, sawing up wood, getting pumped arms. Who'd have thought it a year ago?

What the hedge trimmer trims - badly. Coppiced chestnut knackered.

Aftermath.

A lot of it is pushed to the sides, all tangled up. Bit of a job to get it sorted...

...but we're up to the task!

The result: free wood for an hour or two's pleasant work in the morning.

Heating and cooking thoughts

Only problem with our land is there are no trees and so we have to buy in wood, and oil for the boiler. Oil's going to get very scarce very soon, and everyone will be turning to wood heating as a substitute, thereby bumping the price of wood up.

It would be good to go into partnership with someone who has enough wood to spare but is no good at the gardening. We could provide the food all year (meat, fruit, veg, diary) and they could provide the wood. We'd need about 10 cords per year, which would cost E160 per cord, or E1600. E1600's worth of food equals about E31 per week - about what it would cost to get a bag of veg, a bit of cheese or eggs and a chicken from a market. Each week I could drop off the food and collect 10 cords of wood each winter. It would mean having a bit more of the field taken up with veg beds, but time-wise it wouldn't be too different as I'd be out there anyway.

Also, there's the hangar. The roof faces south-west and gets the sun full on it from midday. All corrugated iron, getting hot. Must be 200m2 in all, which is a big old solar collector. Paint it black, lay pipes in the channels of the sheeting, cover with corrugated clear sheeting and connect to a thermosyphon system with a big accumulator tank? Wouldn't be the world's most efficient system but who cares if you get at least some warm water from it and save on the electric bill?

Then there's biogas. Anaerobic bacteria kept warm enough will break starch down into methane and carbon dioxide, which happens in stagnant ponds, and cows' backsides. If you fill a vessel with slurry and put a lid on it to keep the air out, it ferments and gives the gas off. How long it takes depends on the temperature - 55C is thought to be the best. There is an interesting document at www.bioenergylists.org/compactbiogas about a system used in India that cooks a meal for 5 people each day from 2 kgs of flour. India tends to be warmer than here, but you could use some of the gas produced to keep a pilot light going under the vessel, and insulate it well. If chicken manure mixed to a slurry with vegetable waste could do the same thing, or Farmer Phil's slurry tank could be utilised, you could get a source of heat for nowt.