One Yard, Three Sheds, Since 2009

Ingrid started Stackmoro in 2009 with a secondhand splitter and a pickup, selling half cords to neighbours on the east side of Duluth from wood she had cut and stacked the year before. The second winter she sold everything she had by January and decided she would never again sell wood she had not dried for a full year.

Today the yard dries about 300 cords at a time under three open-sided sheds. Tom drives the truck and does most of the stacking. Every load is still metered before it leaves, and the splitter from 2009 still works, though it now only does the kindling.

People ask why we are fussy about 20 percent, so here is the long answer. Wood fresh off the stump is close to half water by weight, and every drop of it has to boil off in your stove before the wood itself will burn, which means a wet fire spends its heat making steam instead of warming the room, smoulders instead of flames, and sends a cool, sooty smoke up the flue where the tar in it condenses on the cold chimney walls as creosote, the black, shiny crust that a sweep scrapes out and that, left long enough, catches fire on its own. Dry wood does none of that. It catches from one match, burns with a clear flame, warms the flue quickly so the smoke goes up and out, and gives you something like a third more heat from the same stack. You can hear the difference too: wet wood hisses and spits, and dry wood just burns. That is the whole reason for the sheds, the year of waiting and the meter, and it is why we would rather lose an order in October than sell a load that is not ready.