Fire is life on the homestead

1 minute

Water and fire were two important considerations when looking into your new place to expand your survival life and homestead.  Growing up backpacking and camping taught me the true importance of fire and water.  Fire has kept me warm and fed while water has kept me hydrated and is an important ingredient when cooking and keeping things clean.  Our new homestead has a lot of downed wood and a wood burning stove and is set on a seasonal river that runs most months out of the year.  We also are on a well and the water table is not in threat of running dry anytime soon, there are about 27 billion cubic meters of water.  It is important to consider how you will stay warm, cook your food and have water to clean with.  Instead of the dread that downed wood clean up could bring for some, we are just happy to have the wood available to sustain our family and the wood stove to warm our home, even if it means more work.  Now that we are here it is a matter of actually doing something with all the down wood which led us to buying our first chainsaw and the soon delivery of our first log splitter.  Once the log splitter arrives we will post more on splitting our logs.

While trying to decide on what chainsaw to buy we learned that Stihl and Husky were some of the best brands available in the business for long lasting performance.  Stihl seems to be good for all around wood work and limbing while Husky is good for big logging type projects.  We have some big logs to tackle but didn’t want to deal with the weight of a longer chainsaw blade and were more drawn to the Stihl performance record.  Jon opted for a 24” Stihl and so far it has been a good investment.  Bigger blades are not necessarily better and there is something to be said about getting enough to do the job.  We need a good ax but are on our way to a good winter supply.

Tell us what has worked for you!