Reload Variety Challenge

[Caw]

It's the middle of February, cold, and about to be February break where those of of with kids are about to be trapped inside with them for 9 days in a row. Yikes. Let's have some fun and put our wood burner creativity and resourcefulness to the test with a little challenge. I love burning different combos of wood so:

How many species of wood can you fit into one single stove reload?

Dig through your stacks and let's see who has the best variety available! Some simple rules:

1. Show us a picture of the splits.
2. No green wood. It doesn't count if it's not ready to burn.
3. It all has to fit in a single reload and you have to actually do it!
4. Different subspecies count if we can tell them apart in the pics. For example: red and white oak.

Honor system here...wood burning pride is on the line!

 

[Caw]

I'll start us off with 4 species this reload L to R:

Ash
Red Oak
Black Cherry
Red Maple

 

[andym]

The guys with the 30 cbft outdoor boilers will win this one for sure.

 

[Caw]

Ha maybe we will just DQ them. Stoves only. Or maybe they won't have any wood variety!

 

[andym]

Ha maybe we will just DQ them. Stoves only. Or maybe they won't have any wood variety!

You did say it had to be dry!
If I dug around my stacks, I'm pretty sure I could get red elm, ?white elm?, ash, cherry, sugar maple, basswood, apple. My furnace would hold a stick of each easily.
Next year I'll have walnut, mulberry, coffeetree (I think), hickory, and a bit of red pine to add to the list. Plus 2 or 3 unidentified odd kinds. Definitely more varieties than I could fit in one load. Perhaps too many for one day! Maybe I'll get around to assembling a load and post a pic.

 

[NickW]

Right now I think I could hit 4 or 5; next year I could go ash, elm, sugar maple, cottonwood, Aspen, beech, hickory, honey locust, box elder, birch, pine, silver maple, cherry... Ok, maybe in 2 years for some of them to be "properly" seasoned...

 

[Woodsplitter67]

I'll never win this.. I dont have much variety.. I mostly have oak.. black, pin, white ,red.. some cherry, and apple. I may have a stick or 2 of black walnut

 

[Gearhead660]

Left to right: spruce, pine, locust, maple, elm, apple, birch, cottonwood, hickory, oak, walnut. Missing from pic is ash. Still had room so I threw another piece of elm and ash in.

 

[Gearhead660]

Thanks @Caw for a reason to get out and dig in the stacks. Starting to get stir crazy with this cold and snow, cant get out in woods to cut....

 

[stoveliker]

And I thought I'd listened well to the folks on here telling me "go with big splits" as they burn more controlled - so I now I learn this was all to immediately make me finish last in this contest.
Thanks @Caw


-starts resplitting his big splits b/c he can't refrain from competing-

 

[Caw]

@Gearhead660 has raised the bar folks! Get digging through those stacks. He's gonna be tough to beat. I can't compete with that variety...

 

[Gearhead660]

@Gearhead660 has raised the bar folks! Get digging through those stacks. He's gonna be tough to beat. I can't compete with that variety...

View attachment 274419

Got a couple more flavors I could add...didnt want to set the bar too high out of the gate.

 

[Stinkpickle]

Mine would be boring, too. I only have ash and oak seasoned for this year. Next year, I will have some walnut, hackberry, and mulberry ready for the mix, though. I currently have some seasoned hickory, cherry, and apple, but those are for the smokers, not the wood stove.

 

[stoveliker]

Left to right, cherry, ash, dogwood (I think), cedar, red oak, sassafras, maple.

Loaded N/S filling up half the firebox.

Lit up with an additional piece of dogwood.

 

[stoveliker]

The only other stuff I have is locust. But that still has to go 3 more years.

 

[Commodorefirst]

What is up with all this split stuff, lol. My bucket only has rounds.

If I had seen this sooner I would have moved to a different part of the wood shed.

I know I can’t compete with variety, but currently a mix of Silver Maple, Sugar Maple, Red Oak, White Oak, and Elm, all from about 6-9 years ago. In the bin or in the stove.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

We're in the middle of a major cold snap for Texas (I know our cold is like normal winter for the rest of you). It hasn't been out of the 20's today and won't be till Wednesday with nights dropping to the single digits. Everything outside is covered with ice, so we're loading rounds of oak and burning down coals with cedar for the next week or so. I'm not going to attempt the variety challenge officially, but it was fun to think about the varieties that I have loaded in my stove down here in Texas, and I thought I'd share a list.

Red Oak
Live Oak
Ashe Juniper (aka Texas Cedar)
Hackberry
?? Cedar Elm?? (We cut some volunteers in our back yard but have not been certain of the identification.)
Photinia
Vitex
Crape Myrtle
Cherry
Peach
Loquat
Pomegranate
Rosemary (No, I'm not kidding, but it was only a piece or two. The rest made the most amazing-smelling mulch for my garden paths.)

My husband and I were just discussing chipping a large pile of prunings from a Satsuma Mandarin tree in our backyard. This thread makes me think I should save some of the larger pieces for kindling just so that I can say in the future that I've burned orange wood in the stove.

 

[Caw]

Impressive list! It's always interesting to see the varieties burned across different regions.

Quite a few species I've never heard of:

Vitex, Myrtle, Loquat, Photinia

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Impressive list! It's always interesting to see the varieties burned across different regions.

Quite a few species I've never heard of:

Vitex, Myrtle, Loquat, Photinia

I had never heard of Loquat or Photinia before moving here either. Loquat is a big evergreen fruit tree from China, I believe. One of my first tasks when I moved down here was to try to figure out what on earth was growing in my yard, and it was quite an adventure. I had grown up studying trees, and suddenly I was just lost. In part that was because the previous owners had planted so many unusual varieties. Lots of plants were crowding one another, and I had to learn in order to know what to sacrifice and what to save. I made some nice jelly and jam and barbecue sauce from a small loquat harvest this spring, but it's labor intensive as the fruits are small with big pits.

Photinia is planted all over the south apparently. It can be attractive with bright red tips on the branches, but it gets a fungal disease that destroys it and can spread to other species. We had very overgrown hedges with dead and dying plants that needed to be removed. Most of it we mulched, but the big trunks we saved for firewood.

Vitex is sort of like the deep South version of a butterfly bush or lilac. They can be very pretty, but ours had been planted way too closely to some fruit trees and needed to be removed. They were like a huge shrub, but had big trunks (for a shrub) at the bottom. We are still battling the suckers that keep springing up.

Crape Myrtle is a very popular ornamental. It grows a multi-trunked tree that stays narrow, but it's a very dense wood. People prune these a lot ("crape murder" it's often called because it's done more than necessary), and I used to gather wood from neighbor's when I lived in suburbs outside of D.C. It was great hard wood for filling little gaps in the stove. We have several all around our property that we leave alone, but we've had to remove some entirely because of crowding issues.

I remembered another variety we've burned. It was a wax-leaf ligustrum. It was a very pretty tree but was competing with others in our backyard and can be quite invasive in this area, so it was one of the first we cut. I was proud because it was the first time I had used a chainsaw (electric) to fell a tree. (It was one small step in my goal to become one quarter of the woman that my mother is.)

 

[Caw]

Thanks for sharing that was very educational! Wood burning truly is a very regionally different thing.

 

[johneh]

I would never win all I have is Hickory and sugar maple

 

[Caw]

I would never win all I have is Hickory and sugar maple

Not a bad thing though! I'll trade you some oak for hickory...haven't had the opportunity to try hickory yet except small chunks in the smoker.