Ashes by the Bucket Load

Wait till you try elm. I think I emptied the stove every other day the last time I had a load of that.

I get about five gallons a month burning all pine, maybe three gallons a week burning oak and maple.

I don't know how my stove does with elm because I split a lifetime's worth of that stuff as a kid, and now I am done.

Not sure if it has to do with the moisture content of the wood or not....or how hot you run the sove but ,yes, burning elm leaves lots of big ash chunks in my stoves. Hedge, locust and mulberry not so much ash. Also I clean out my stoves pretty much after every burn... is there something I don't understand..?

I have a 35 gallon metal can outside the door. Once it's ful I haul it out the sink hole with the quad. I only dump it once annually.

I only clean out my stoves when there's a warmer day, typically every week and a half or 2.

My ash bucket is the size of a 5 gal bucket, I dump it 4x a heating season so maybe about 20 gallons of ash! I dump it in my row crop fields.

Interesting thread in terms of the differences everyone experiences. I pretty much have to clean out our stove after every burn, dump ash pan every three or four days.

I've always tried to find something useful to do with the ashes, but haven't ever found anything. A friend of mine said he dumped his for a year in a particular spot in his garden. Literally nothing has ever grown in that area since. Not even weeds.

Thus, mine end up in the garbage every month or so. I put ours in an aluminum garbage can off the back deck until disposal.

I wonder about that ash in the garden. I'm so tempted to do it but I don't want to over do it and screw up my garden. I just put ash in the skid steer bucket and when it snows it all just gets mixed in in the piles or scattered around the driveway!

I have a plastic bag in my 33 gallon metal can that I dump in cold ashes. I still have torn a bag yet when lifting it out, but that day will come.

Lloyd the redneck said:

I wonder about that ash in the garden. I'm so tempted to do it but I don't want to over do it and screw up my garden. I just put ash in the skid steer bucket and when it snows it all just gets mixed in in the piles or scattered around the driveway!

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Wood ashes will raise the soil pH and potassium levels. So it depends where those start out at. If your soil is low pH and low potassium then spreading wood ashes will help plant growth. If your soil starts out at high pH then you really don't want to be spreading wood ashes. And even if your soil would benefit from wood ashes, it doesn't need too much. 1-2 ton/acre will have an effect. That's only 50-100 lbs/ 1000 sq ft. That's not a lot. It's easy to see how dumping an entire season's worth on maybe 10 sq ft would come close to sterilizing that spot.

Iget about 4 gallons of ash per cord of spruce.

Have a 35 gal galvanized trash can to catch the buckets coming out of the stove. Half full is plenty heavy for me.

As above, wood ash is very high in potassium, i use about 1/2 cup per plant when transplanting tomatoes, but they want some calcium with that.

Not too many climate change deniers left in Alaska. That'll be where we get our peaches from someday.