Whether you are prepping for short or long term issues, having a store of burnable wood is at the very least desirable, if not essential. It doesn’t even need to be just for SHTF situations.

Every year, when spending an evening outside in the garden, I often light our chimenea, fire pit or both so try to have tried to keep a bag of wood available and dry for just this purpose, often having to go out last minute and pick one up from a DIY or discount shop. Since I’ve got the prepping mindset these days, it seemed logical for me to develop this further since if it came to necessity, having the means to keep a fire burning would certainly be helpful. In my Off-Grid Cooking post, simply cooking and heating water over an open fire was one of the backstops when all else has failed and for that to be an option I need to have some kind of wood reserve.

Of course you can pick up a piece of wood off the ground and throw it on a fire and it will burn, kind of. It will be difficult to light, smoke a great deal and simply not burn as well as if it was selected and stored correctly.

Some woods will burn better than others. Hardwood is preferred to softwood for example and wood from conifers is often ruled out as it can have too much resin in it which never dries out and can stick to the sides of chimneys. In spite of this though, I am going to try some conifer wood, cut down from my garden, on an open fire as the resin may not be as bad as I have read for this use. I have also cut some large branches from an overhanging tree and cut it into useable logs.

Wood needs to be seasoned before it will really burn well. It has to be stored sheltered from rain but with fresh airflow around it to properly reduce the moisture content. This is a process that can take 1-2 years. I have built a simple 4’x4’x2’ log store at the side of the garden and put my freshly cut logs at the bottom and bought some seasoned softwood logs for immediate use, placing them on top.

It makes a nice garden feature, provides readily usable logs for the chimenea and fire-pit whilst allowing me to season any other wood I can add to it so hopefully I can cut down how many logs I have to buy. It’s another example where prepping has practical uses even for day to day concerns.

My next thought is whether to replace the open gas fire in the living room, which gets used for backup/alternative to the central heating if and when required, with a wood burning stove. The upside is it is more readily usable in case of a SHTF situation but the downside is it’s not exactly controllable like a nice simple gas valve. Not sure about that one…….