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Seasoned firewood harder to come by in North Country

Posted 11/22/14

By CRAIG FREILICH If you’re hoping to get dry firewood to heat your home this winter, you’re probably too late. Firewood dealers in St. Lawrence County say that if you want seasoned firewood for …

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Seasoned firewood harder to come by in North Country

Posted

By CRAIG FREILICH

If you’re hoping to get dry firewood to heat your home this winter, you’re probably too late.

Firewood dealers in St. Lawrence County say that if you want seasoned firewood for the winter, you should have ordered several months ago, and people who wait until it gets cold will probably be disappointed.

At Toomey Brothers Logging in Hopkinton, “It’s first-come, first-served,” said Mary Jane Toomey from the business office.

“We had about 700 cord, but it sold out early. Always does.”

Dale Matthews of Matthews Firewood in Brasher agrees “it’s late to order seasoned wood.”

“Our dry wood is running out. We’re filling old orders first,” he said.

“People should order well in advance. In the old days people would be ordering now for next year. But people seem to have switched to ordering in June, July and August” for the winter, Matthews said, and that’s tough during a wet summer “when we weren’t getting the wood on.”

Toomey said she couldn’t agree more. It would make more sense if people would put in their orders well in advance, she said.

Wet Weather Challenges

This year’s wet weather has been challenging for many of St. Lawrence County’s cord wood providers.

Toomey said that due to the weather and regulations restricting logging in the mud –which Toomey said make sense -- they are a bit behind where they would normally want to be, in terms of wood cut and ready to go.

“We got a late wet start. The only dry month was September,” she said.

Even though this past spring and summer were the second wettest spring and summer in a row, Matthews said he has had a good year in spite of the mud.

“We’ve been busy. We still have a lot to move,” he said.

“Sometimes it’s hard to understand. Wood is a major necessity for some people. Don’t wait to order until the first cold day,” Toomey said. “If you’re calling in July, you should be ordering your wood for next year.”

While wood that's not perfectly seasoned will still burn, it calls for more attention to the chimney to prevent fires, experienced wood dealers say.

Toomey’s has been cutting wood for decades. They are well known, and do a lot of business in St. Lawrence and Franklin counties.

When they cut firewood, they store it up to season for a year, if they can, and they have been delivering the last of their dry wood by August in recent years.

Green Wood Caution

Earlier this month, Matthews said he had some seasoned wood left. “I’ve heard a lot of complaints, but I don’t see a shortage,” he said, but he told us back then that what he had wouldn’t last long.

But people need the wood, and green wood will burn – not as well as dry wood, but it will burn.

Toomey and Matthews warn people who burn green wood to keep an eye on their chimneys.

In addition to unseasoned wood, people might try to save money by burning “junk wood – slab wood, pine, which have more pitch” and will leave more creosote in the chimney pipes, Matthews said.

“Know your chimney,” he said. Know when it needs to be cleaned and clean it, and your chances of a chimney or roof fire are much lower.

Chimney problems are “possible with anything,” Toomey says, but the chances of trouble go way up “if you’re not monitoring your chimney, if you get complacent.”

Dealers Come and Go

Matthews said he’s been hearing more and more from people who might have relied for their firewood in the past on small-scale dealers who have gone out of business.

Many small dealers are pretty new to the business, and some have learned that “the money’s not what they thought,” he said.

In some cases, they have left the woods, forcing their former customers to seek out more established dealers. That can reduce the stocks of the remaining cord wood suppliers.

“People come and go all the time. When they start, they don’t realize they have to buy equipment, get a supply of wood, sometimes hundreds of acres, something to get the wood out with, and something to deliver the wood, too. Eventually they realize it’s a lot of work for not a lot of money and they can go in the red pretty quick,” Matthews said.