The Look
It’s a big round pile of wood.
How-To
In principle this is an easy one, but in reality it’s tricky and at times difficult. First, there is the issue of dunnage—how to keep a giant round brick of wood off the ground. I didn’t have any pallets (which I figured is the most effective way to do it), so I just piled directly on the ground, sacrificing some old rotted wood for the bottom course.
Then, because the wood is being stacked in a circular pattern, the pieces touch each other at the inside of the circle, but logs sit with large gaps between them along the outside perimeter. This means that care has to be taken to keep the weight of the stack leaning back to the center of the circle. I find this woodpile works best with all of the lop-sided, bizarre, and uneven pieces that are frustrating to fit into the other two pile styles. The Shaker requires logs that are fat on one end and thin on the other, which can be in short supply. In fact, while building my round pile, I ended up scavenging through the other two completed stacks looking for chunks of oddly shaped wood.
When building up the outer walls, I could fill the inside of the circle with all of the really screwy pieces—6-inch cutoffs, lumpy bricks of knots, and others just too disfigured to exist in any sane woodpile. The round pile serves as a large garbage can, built out of bad pieces, ready to stow the even worse pieces.
The Good and the Bad
This method moves along fairly quickly. It’s not as fast as the 2 x 4 method, but it’s faster than the traditional towers. A place to toss all the oddballs is nice. And the pile is compact, so there’s less time wasted walking up and down the 20-foot stack looking for the perfect place to wedge the next piece. Because I had such an abundance of oddly shaped chunks, the round pile worked great as a companion to the other ones. In fact, I plan on building at least one every year from here on out, just for the freaks.
In my part of upper New England, winters are long and cold; security is a big stack of well-seasoned firewood. The urge to "get the wood in" runs deep. It’s an itch that kicks up when the leaves begin turning in mid-August and that won’t stay scratched until the snow season’s fuel supply is split, stacked, and ready to hand.
There is an art and a science to stacking firewood in a woodpile. Some say there’s a spiritual side to it as well, but I can’t help you much with that. You’d have to come to meeting already knowing that there’s something more to a tree than wood, bark, and leaves as the Indians and the old-time French-Canadian axmen did, and the way a few modern woodsmen and women still do.
Firewood just dumped in a heap won’t dry and it won’t burn well. Rain will run down and soak into cut ends while ground moisture will migrate up and soak into spongy inner bark. But even the toughest ash and beech fire logs will start quickly and burn efficiently (with little creosote-making smoke) if seasoned in the woods for 6 months to a year, sectioned to stove length, the big logs half-split, and all of it piled in the woodshed or barn for some months more. The hardwood should be quartered; the pine should be split to kindling and piled again to surface-dry in a warm cellar for a few weeks or months and finally brought upstairs to heat and dry crisp for a day or two near the stove. Henry Thoreau neglected the work of piling and repiling when he wrote, "Wood warms you twice …once when you cut it and again when you burn it." By my count it warms you six or seven times — most of that in building and tearing down woodpiles.
