Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Firewood: What variety do you like best?

Ash and maple. Cherry and hickory when we find it down and dead.

Hop Hornbeam (iron wood here in Eastern Ontario) if you can find any. Beech, ash and maple is more prevalent in my woodlot. I burn pretty much any tree that needs removal, including the soft woods.

Nick

stuff's nice for smoking chicken.

My favorite is a "blue" oak. These are dead oak trees that take on a bluish gray color on some of the bark while they have been standing for a year or two. Aged and dry and ready to burn...

White oak and hickory are preferred, maple some, locust when I can

I prefer big red oaks. If we lose one of the big ones to ice or wind and I can cut it when it’s green it splits easy and dries nicely stacked out over the spring and summer.

We have a black locust grove that’s a couple acres and I cut quite a bit of that. Best cut green, split and stacked out, easier to avoid rotten ones that way. I have about 3 ricks stacked on the porch right now that we’re feeding the stove with.

Been cutting a lot of ash lately as we lost a bunch last winter. They split easy and burn nice but produce a lot of ash, have to muck the stove out every other day.

Black walnut burns hot and long if you mix it with something else. Hard to get started by itself. I don’t cut a ton of it but did cut up a little last weekend.

Bodark I mostly stay away from. Burned the firebox out of a potbelly in high school burning scraps from building self bows. Not hard to get your stove too hot with it if you’re not careful.

Slick elm is easy to cut and handle, bark slides right off a dead tree when it’s ready to burn. Basically unsplitable without hydraulics. Dad burns it in his fireplace since he can fit big rounds. Makes a pretty fire with long orange flames.

Red elm is much better than slick elm but less common. It’s a harder wood and splittable. Me and dad are on a constant scout in old hedgerows and creek bottoms for dead standing red elms.

Here in North Florida, we're pretty much limited to Live Oaks..

Around here its Fir or Jackpine mostly, these are some Fir tree's that are going to make it into the back of my truck, about 1 1/2 cords per tree. I have to saw the pieces in half (at least) to get them into the truck.

Oak and ash. Of course locust is the best firewood, but the blight hit 20 years ago and killed all my locust trees. I will run out of locust next year. For that matter, all the ash trees are dead too.

Oak and hickory mostly here. I use wood in the shop so I don't require a whole lot.

Growing up, I remember being in the woods all summer long cutting, splitting and stacking wood. 25 rick got us through the winter plus we cut for 8 -10 other people.

Broke down and bought a 20 ton gas log splitter from harbor freight 8 years ago. It's been a great help and since it splits in both directions it's much faster. I was pleasantly surprised at how fast you could split with with it. Beats the hell out of the axe and maul any day!

When I heated with wood it was mostly Doug-fir and Alder. The only redeeming quality to the alder was ease of splitting. You could walk along and swing an axe like a golf club and split the alder as it lay on the ground. It made shiatty kindling and made a ton of ash as it burned.

Now , for backyard fires or camping, I bring home dimensional scraps and dunnage from work. Mostly Doug-fir. Zip it up with the chop saw into 12-14” pieces.

White oak, hickory, and maple when I can find it. Maple is hard to beat.

[s][/s]
My wood cache is dwindling fast, wife believes the stove should be rollin when it's 55 outside.
Living in two states basically with many weekends away from the woodburning home keeps putting me behind.

My brother in law has a friend from early 1970s army days. He is now a PHD professor at some university up in Delaware and lives in New Jersey. He told me that there were people up there burning shelled corn in wood heaters when corn was cheap. I asked him if they had trees up there and he affirmed they did but that corn had been cheap (not anymore) and it was easy to just burn that. At first I thought he was talking about corn stalks but he said it was shelled whole corn.

Cannot be cost effective even at 3 or 4 dollars a bag. Those little firewood bundles at stores would dollar out tremendously if figured by the cord.

I think on a dry basis it all has the same BTU's per pound.

+2
Long preferred World-wide as the best charcoal for making blackpowder. Plenty of heat and virtually no ash.

Only time I get to use my wood stove is deer or elk camp. The area I hunt, I like to down and Burn Tamarack

I wish it to be rollin too. Hell I don’t mind cutting the wood, just let me be warm without a fuss.
She dresses up in 3 layers of North Face and Patagonia mountaineering wear and fusses about have burn more than a few chunks of wood.
It’s like those crying jew commercials around this house. I can almost see my breath inside the house and we got 20 cords of wood cut. Wtf

You burn what you can get, pine works just fine. At the cabin.

Mesquite