If you want an up-close-and-personal, in-your-face experience with God’s Garden (what I call “the natural world”), then heat your home with wood!
We converted from oil to wood last year, and this is our first season 100% oil-free. It’s been quite the education!
Instead of the simple problem of affording this year’s oil delivery, then simply pushing a button to warm the house, we now are engaged with our fuel source for much of the year, in raw and different forms.
First, there’s the same problem of affording bulk fuel for three-quarters of the year. Then there’s where to get the wood from. Then there’s what size to get (truckload of logs to cut up on the premises, or multiple truckloads of already cut and split to proper size). Then there’s what kind to get (hardwood vs. softwood). Then there’s when to have it delivered. Then there’s where to stack it, and finding time to do so. Then there’s how to protect it from the elements yet be able to access it during deep winter, while allowing it to continuously dry. Then there’s hauling it into the house; feeding it into the furnace; and keeping the fire going. Then there’s tinder and kindling and moisture and insects to deal with. The same cycle to be repeated every year.
After all this, one looks at trees in a new way! They become a commodity, the same way livestock does. One of the first things I learned when I moved to a rural environment is that pet owners and farmers view animals through a different lens. Once you directly depend on a living being — whether animal or a plant — for livelihood or survival, your relationship with it, and the world, changes. So many of us are insulated from the substances that sustain us, it comes as quite a shock when you begin to understand source, sequence, and processing.
Burning wood has made me aware of trees as individuals and as forests, as raw material as well as the lungs of the planet. More than ever, we need to maintain them as a healthy, renewable resource, at the same time preserving them for the other critters on the planet. It’s a complicated equation. But it opens your heart to gardens in a weirdly direct way because now the tall framework of God’s Garden is what’s keeping you from freezing to death as well as putting food on your table.
Carolyn Haley
Author: Open Your Heart with Gardens
Posted by: Opening the heart, gardens, gardening, yard, plants, cultivation — Carolyn Haley
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