For years Your Scribe lived in fear of green wood. That an upcountry rascal would lay a cord of green on me when I was paying for seasoned hardwood.

Or that green wood would smolder and falter while I hosted a social gathering, and I would be forced to open windows in sub-zero weather. My reputation (such as it was) as an outdoorsman would be severely singed.

But since installing a woodstove in the cabin, I have come to an accommodation with green wood. The logs, some of them pictured above, burn fine in a Jotul stove.

These pieces were cut a month ago as part of the logistically immense project of putting in a well. It is poplar, and it is green. But it burns like a decade-old hard maple in the stove.

In most of my past lives, I had fireplaces. Maybe that is the difference. Green wood could be fatal in a fireplace but the heat generated in an enclosed stove makes it burn with gusto.

When I lived in Waterville, I must have burned a cord of dry every winter. Ninety percent of the heat went right up the chimney.

In Kennebunk, too, the heat went straight up. (I burned pine in those days, and the residue also went skyward - though it likely stuck on the innards of the chimney without entering any celestial part of York County).

Oddly, my best heating and best drawing fireplace was in Mississippi but perhaps that was because it was much warmer outside, and there was no conflict with rising heat interacting with frigid air as we have in Maine. (An aside: That house was 100 yards from the Gulf of Mexico, and I understand it literally disappeared during vicious Hurricane Katrina).

They say we get wiser as we approach our dotage. I don't know if I am smarter now but I do possess a mature, non-discriminatory attitude when it comes to green vs. dry.

Green works for me. And there's a lot more of it on my land than the seasoned, nicely split dry cords that are filling most folks' driveways this fall.

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