Keeping the Wood: Firewood From Your Own Removed Tree

When a tree comes down, there is usually a moment where somebody looks at the pile of rounds and says it seems a shame to haul all that away. Sometimes they are right. A big spruce or a mature poplar represents a real amount of firewood, and it is already in your yard.

There are a few things worth knowing before you ask the crew to leave it: how long it takes to dry, how much space it needs, what it will actually be like to burn, and which species you are not allowed to keep.

Green Wood Does Not Burn

Freshly cut wood can be half water by weight. Burn it and most of the fire's energy goes into boiling that water off, which means low heat, heavy smoke, and creosote building up in the chimney.

Seasoning takes time. Split, stacked off the ground, and covered on top but open on the sides, most species need at least a year in our climate, and dense hardwoods longer. Wood cut in October is not this winter's firewood.

Split It Now, Not Later

Rounds dry slowly because bark is designed to hold moisture in. Splitting exposes the interior and dramatically speeds drying, so the sooner rounds get split after the tree comes down, the better.

Green wood also splits more easily than wood that has dried and case-hardened. If you are keeping it, plan to deal with it within a few weeks rather than letting rounds sit in a heap for a year.

What Calgary Species Are Like to Burn

Birch is the local favourite: it splits well, dries reasonably fast, and burns hot and clean. Ash burns well too. Poplar and willow are low density, so they light easily and burn fast without much heat, which makes them acceptable shoulder-season wood and poor overnight wood.

Spruce and pine are resinous, spark and pop, and lay down more creosote, so they suit an outdoor fire pit better than an indoor stove. Apple and other fruit woods burn beautifully but are usually available only in small quantities.

The Elm Rule

Alberta restricts storing elm firewood because stored elm wood provides breeding habitat for the elm bark beetles that spread Dutch elm disease. This is not a formality, and it is the reason a crew will tell you elm has to leave the property.

If your removal is an elm, the wood goes. The same logic applies to keeping any diseased wood on site, since a woodpile full of borers or fungal material sitting beside your remaining trees is a poor trade for a season of heat.

Space, Pests, and Stacking

A mature tree makes more wood than people expect, often several cords, and a cord takes real space. Stack it off the ground on pallets or rails, in a single row where air can move through, with the top covered and the sides open.

Keep the stack away from the house and the fence. A woodpile against siding is an invitation to carpenter ants, mice, and wasps, and moving it later is a genuinely miserable afternoon.

Tell the Crew Before They Start

How a tree gets dismantled changes if the wood is being kept. Rounds can be cut to stove length as the tree comes down instead of being bucked for the chipper, and they can be stacked somewhere sensible rather than dropped wherever is convenient.

That is a two-minute conversation at the start and saves hours later. Aardvark Tree Care can leave rounds cut to length, leave the chips, or clear everything away, whichever suits what you actually plan to do with it.

Wood cut this fall is next winter's firewood at best, and only if you split it now.