Here's the Story of our Firewood
Seasoned Firewood can be used for burning in a fireplace, wood stove or backyard fire pit. Before ordering firewood make sure you understand what you are buying.
Make sure you have room to store the wood. Upon arrival, we can dump it or we can stack it for you. A full cord when stacked should be approximately 8 feet long x 4 feet deep by 4 feet high, or 128 cubic feet. We have good wood and don’t use pine or spruce for seasoned firewood. You don't want to burn green wood. Green wood is recently harvested wood that is very heavy due to its high moisture content.
TML offers free delivery to our friends in Hamilton or Wenham. When you order your wood, be thoughtful about where you want it to be delivered. Your wood will be dropped, by a truck, on an area marked by you. To indicate this area, you can leave a trash can flipped upside down, a ladder or some other marker. Make sure we can access the space with a dump truck and don't need to drive over the lawn, or worse, your septic system. Also make sure that if you are stacking this wood yourself, you’re not unintentionally cheating yourself out of your favorite parking spot if you can’t get to the pile for a few days.
We offer our clients seasoned firewood for sale each fall season. We have a huge pile of it, sort of like the piles you see when you head up to Maine. We actually keep this pile on our property located in Essex. The wood we collect is typically sourced from other jobs and local tree companies who need a place to put the wood they remove from other local jobs. We don’t ever import wood from other places outside our region; this can be dangerous because sometimes these other places can harbor non-native insects and pests that can do real damage to other wood nearby. Our wood is so local that we can literally tell you where the most recent batch of wood came from, and chances are very high they came from within a 5 mile radius of where you are.
Once we cut down the wood/or receive it, we let it bask in the sun, outdoors, for at least six months to a year before we offer it to you. Our wood isn’t kiln dried, it's air dried, and there’s a difference between the two. Air dried wood is graded and sorted for the natural process of drying in the open air by stacking them with spacers between each one, whereas kiln dried wood is seasoned wood without the 6 month wait due to using a kiln to manually dry the wood. For naturally seasoned wood, logs are left to dry in the open with cover overhead for a period of time, which can range from 8-16 months depending on the species. Air drying allows the wood to naturally dry out the log evenly. Given time, the moisture content in the wood adjusts to the environment it is in to reach Equilibrium Moisture Content, wherein the wood neither gains nor loses moisture. We think it’s actually a pretty fascinating process!
Seasoned firewood has loose bark or missing bark. The ends are typically darkened, dried out and starting to crack. Seasoned firewood can get wet from rain or dew from being outside but it is still considered seasoned. If the seasoned wood gets wets, the natural process of drying will actually speed up the curing process. And, rained-on seasoned wood will dry out again for burning within a few days.
We hope this helps you understand the process of getting firewood to you; let us know if you have any questions!