The Idler

Country Diary 89

27 November 2009

WHAT FOUL WEATHER. The rain has been pouring to the extent that our little stream is overflowing, and this morning I had to carry the children through a deep puddle to get to the school bus. The wind has been blowing and together these two elemental forces have been making a mockery of my carefully laid plans as far as wood storage goes. I have three or four neat piles of logs in the yard. I stopped piling up logs in the wood barn, because they seemed to sit there and refuse to dry out. I’ve learned now – the hard way – that log merchants never deliver properly seasoned wood. They will all tell you it is dry, but it never is. That at least is a good rule to live by: if you are occasionally lucky and he delivers wood that is ready to burn, then you can consider that to be a bonus. But in general, the wood is not properly dried out. Last winter we had plenty of logs, but when put in the fire, they sat there and smouldered in desultory fashion. The smouldering would be OK if they actually gave off some heat. But these smouldering logs seemed to have the reverse effect: they positively sucked warmth out of the room. They smouldered because they were not dry. They were still packed with the moisture that all trees have when they are just cut down. To prove this, you need only to buy yourself a moisture meter. These handy little gadgets will display the water content of your logs. You are aiming for 20%, and my smouldering logs, I discovered, had a moisture content of 50% or more. They will take a year to dry out if kept soemwhere reasonably dry and draughty.

But later in the year, after buying a load of logs that, as usual, had been sold as seasoned, but weren’t, I decided to make a pile outdoors. The theory here is that logs exposed to the wind and the sun will dry out more quickly than those left ina damp corner of a barn. This did indeed turn out to be the case, and the logs stored outside dried more quickly. Now, however, they are all used up, and the new pile, which I piled outside needs a bit of drying. My system was to pile a three log deep, four foot high stack and cover it with a piece of plywood weighed down with two tyres to keep off the worst of the rain. But these high winds lifted the ply off the log pile, leaving the logs to get pounded by rain. I then went out ino the rain and put a tarpaulin over the top. This whips around in the wind and doesn’t cover the logs properly, meaning that some are being rained on heavily. Now, I know that rain water dries off far quicker than the moisture inside the logs, but it is still preferable to keep rain off them. So really I should move the entire stack into the barn where it will be dry. But I can’t be bothered, because the weather is too awful. Meanwhile, the dry logs have run out and after a month of raoring fires, my fires now seem to have become smouldery, just at the moment when it is really starting to get cold.

THE BAD WEATHER has also led to total neglect of the vegetable garden. Now is the time that I should be covering it with well rotted muck, which, luckily, we have in great quantities thanks to the otherwise useless pony. Instead, it is getting covered in nettles (although the cabbages and kale plants are thriving). Egg-wise, we are getting only one a day. That has meant buying eggs from the shops. We have compared the shop eggs – which were the best shops eggs, ie free range organic and all the rest of it – with our own, and really there is no comparison. The shop bought eggs have pale yellow yolks whereas our eggs have bright orange yolks. The shop eggs have a runny white (or albumen), whereas our eggs keep their shape when cracked into a pan. And the taste is far superior. I think perhaps that we need a few more hens: a dozen might be wise. Right now we have eight plus the cockerel. Two of those are chicks born on the farm, and while more beautiful than the brown hens, they are not yet laying.

ENDS