I’ve really enjoyed Roger Deakin’s ‘Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees’, the book takes you on a gentle journey, part biography, part manifesto, part travelogue.

As I expect to be spending substantial amounts of time sourcing, collecting, cutting, splitting and stacking logs to keep us warm over the winter, one particular quote struck me as good advice - advice that I’ll try to apply whenever I get around to building that wood store …

…a mosaic of cut log ends that wall the whole of the south-facing end. The summer sun will dry out the end grain, drawing out the sap until the wood is pure energy for the fire.

Anthony Watts’ recent comment on external insulation on my Insulation post (damn, I’ve still not finished that series of posts!) also reminded me of other passages in the same book, where when travelling through eastern Europe, Roger saw houses with great stacks of logs against the house walls, drying whilst improving insulation. Perhaps not a whole solution but potentially a partial, practical, low cost (assuming Anthony burns wood) one.

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