What is wooding, and why is there a blog about it?

Wooding is a verb that is always in the context of wood for fuel. It means to gather, cut, season, and stack wood for eventual use in a wood stove–not necessarily in a home, because historically ships and and trains also used wood and in the 19th century in colonial North America, a “wooding station” was the nautical equivalent of a modern gas station for steamships. But in my case, I wood for a home wood stove.

Why blog about wooding, one of the most routine and boring chores on a working acreage? Because it is one of the most routine and mundane chores on a working acreage. Also: wood is cool.

If these photos don’t persuade you that wooding is cool, I’ve got nothing you want. 🙂

I think (hypothesize, really), that both social change and social resilience in the face of change succeed or fail by their chores. I think that mundane, repeated, context-specific labour like chores are a source of knowledge that shape the type of successes achieved. While the charismatic events and breakthroughs get most of the narrative attention, I think chores are where the rubber meets the road.

I’m blogging my wooding chores to think about chores more consciously, systematically, and deeply. And because I think wood is cool. This blog is a geeky blog, with woods.

As an added bonus, there is actually quite a lot of knowledge that goes into wooding, some of which I have from my father and experience of growing up wooding in northern Alberta, most (but not all!) of which is transferable to the island of Newfoundland where I live and wood now, and some of which is through trail and error, and error again (Folks: wear a hard hat while cutting trees. The top limbs drop when you least expect them). These skills are useful to share in the event of the zombie apocalypse, the rising cost of oil and the instalment of wood stoves, and for anyone (else) whose life aspiration is to disappear into the woods, never to be heard from again. Hi.

Welcome to wooding.blog.

~ Max