ROCKMAN wrote:papa - Forget Douglas. LOL. You ever burn cedar? Full of it in parts of south Texas. Grows like a weed and a very bad water thief. Burns like wood soaked in kerosene. Which is pretty close to what it is.
Growing up for a time my dad had a wood stove installed in the house. Said that having taken out the two coal stoves for the kitchen and central heating when he bought the house was a big mistake only discovered when the oil shocks of the 1970's made fuel oil very expensive even with his brand new 1968 model. I spent a lot of time stacking wood for a few winters in the 70's and we classified all the evergreen wood as Gopher Wood. As in after you throw this billet into the furnace you better 'go for wood' because by the time you walk to the wood pile and back it will be half gone. A good gnarly oak root ball from a sapling in the woods the farmer next door had cleared would burn two or three hours. An equal size chunk of Gopher Wood would burn in 30-45 minutes. We used the root stump balls from the cleared land that had been bulldozed up into a pile at the edge of the woods after the weather had washed all the dirt out of the roots and they had spent a couple years seasoning in all weather. We got the gopher wood when my dad made the mistake of hiring a couple local teens to deliver two cords of wood to get us through the winter and what they delivered was all Gopher Wood, stuff their dad didn't want for the home fireplace. Saplings no more than 3 inch diameter and lots of resin filled evergreen wood all of which is great for a small fire to cook breakfast but useless for a fire to keep the house warm overnight without a stoker having to refill the furnace every hour on the hour. We ended up using the Gopher Wood for the hours between school hours and bed time and stoked up with oak or ash for the long slow burn overnight.
Thanx for the memories, had not thought much about the old wood stove for years.