Still no flying, but…

… I’ve been keeping myself busy since I got back home from ‘down south’. Last Thursday February 13th was my birthday but it was a low-key affair, which I was glad of because I was still getting over the 3 weeks I spent working on Val’s kitchen. Wim and Sophie were off for the week in Arcachon so I was left to myself to enjoy a little bit of R & R. Now, one of the things that the French do very well I think, is what I know as crystallised fruit. At Christmas especially, the local Intermarché supermarket dedicates a whole area to a gorgeous display of the stuff as a sort of ‘Pick ‘n Mix’ of all kinds of irresistible fruits. The only thing that’s a bit off-putting is that it’s not covered up at all so over time, some of the fruits on display become a bit dry and unattractive looking, and who knows what gets deposited on them as hundreds of shoppers pass by every day 😕

The display is still there and although this year the price has gone up quite a bit, to 11.90€/kg, I decided that I’d treat myself on my birthday. To give an idea of what I’m talking about, here’s a pic of a small bowl containing dried figs, prunes, apple, pineapple, papaya, mango, strawberries and black and white grapes.

The latter are nothing like English currants and sultanas, being much more luscious and juicy. OK, it was a little extravagant because just the same as when you buy ‘Pick ‘n Mix’ sweets, you end up shovelling much more than you originally intended to into your bag, and also as a treat, it’s absolutely loaded with calories. But to heck with it, I thought that I deserved it 😉

Since then I’ve done little more except keep my ‘poele à bois’ burning. Val has had a 13 kW Supra built-in stove fitted in her salon that churns out heat fantastically well once it gets up to speed. One of the reasons is that she uses good quality dry wood, which performs much better than the kind of stuff I’ve been getting out of my garden. Even so, she was caught out the last time she had wood delivered because although it was all oak, it was actually pretty wet because of all of the rain we’ve been getting recently. As a result, she was being troubled by the same problems as me – hard to light, slow to get going and a lot of smoke if you open the stove door while it’s doing so.

I suggested that she should get hold of a sack or two of dry, split kindling, which she did, and although the wood was being kept in her nice dry garage, that it would probably dry and burn better of it was split down, because a large proportion of it consisted of quite large logs. As a result, we hired a ‘fendeuse’ like mine for a day and I spent a few hours one Sunday unstacking, splitting and re-stacking the wood. But it was worth it because the theory worked in practise and the stove was immediately back to belting out heat, just as before.

Having learnt these lessons, on Saturday I got hold of a sack of kindling myself from Les Briconautes, together with a sack of small, dry logs to supplement and help get my own wood up to temperature, and have been using them with success for the few days since then. However, my wood situation is a bit tricky, as it’s ‘touch and go’ as to whether I’ll have enough of my own to see me through the winter. I could buy some more (eg 2 stéres of oak) but I don’t want to, because (a) I don’t have enough storage space for it at the moment and (b) I want to empty my present rickety old wood store and build a new one, which would be a bit difficult if it was full up with wood.

Nevertheless, yesterday (Monday) I phoned a local supplier who I’d found on the Internet offering dry wood at a competitive price with ‘no minimum order’ to see what he would charge for delivery. First he said that the distance from his place to my house was too far to deliver only 2 stéres and then he said that his vehicle was ‘en panne’ (broken down), so the signs were not good. He said that he’d call me back but I’m not surprised to be still waiting for his call. So today I thought that I’d try to get a handle on my wood situation and see exactly how much I had left to see me through. I’ve now used up just about all of my dead trees with harder wood and the bulk of the remaining dead wood is in a tree with catkins, that I think from what I can gather from the Internet is called a Corylus. These trees are very common over here and if left, produce a large number of trunks from their base until they almost resemble an enormous bush. That’s what’s happened with the one I have close to my wood store, except over many years, it’s become totally uncontrolled, almost blocking the way around the end of my house. And also, many of the trunks have become totally dead.

So these are the ones I’ve been chopping out with my chain saw. It’s a bit like coppicing and although it now looks rather tatty as a result from some angles, I’m sure that in time new trunks will shoot up to take the place of the large, old dead ones that I’ve removed and the tree will become full again. But as a result of my efforts with my chain saw, in fact I’ve ended up with quite a bit of wood, as the following pics show.

And because the wood is all dead, I can burn it straight away, as I’ve found this evening, so long as I use the ‘Les Briconautes’ dry wood to get it going and up to temperature. So it was a bit of luck, really, that the wood supplier didn’t come back to me, because if he had done and I’d ordered a couple of stéres off him, I have absolutely no idea what I’d have done with it 🙂

I decided that I’d go straight ahead and split down all the wood that I’d cut, not just to make it ready to burn but also to make it lose any moisture it contained quicker. I’d also then be able to see just how much I had to get some sort of idea of how long it might last me. Although I’ve shown some pics of my ‘fendeuse’ previously, I’ve not been able to show it in action. Without someone else being here at the time, it would be difficult to show a video of some kind as it needs two hands to operate it for safety reasons. However, here are a couple of shots of it taken today showing what it can do, albeit with a log of relatively modest size.

The paperwork that came with the machine says that it will handle logs up to 50 cm in length and 25 cm diameter. However, one of the old tree trunks that I split the other day was at least 35-40 cm in diameter and it handled that pretty much with ease, so it’s a pretty handy tool to have. But anyway, I ended up with quite a nice little pile of split-down logs, as shown below.

As you can see, I split my garden wood down pretty small, much smaller than you’d need to if it was good quality, dry hardwood, and this is because it dries out and burns much easier if the stove is hot enough in smaller split pieces. While I was using my splitter, Wim flew over my house in his Weedhopper (CLICK HERE for a video of Wim and his aircraft), so although I think Galinat is still too wet to be flyable, his strip obviously isn’t, the difference being that it’s on the top of a hill whereas Galinat is half-way up one. I think that now I’ve sorted out my wood, I’ll nip across to Galinat to see how wet it still is. But this time, after my last experience, I think that I’ll leave my car on the road outside the airfield 😉