Getting Ready for the Fall

Fall is here and with it is the cooler air! At Red Gate Farm wood is the sole source of heat which means we have lots and lots of wood to chop. We use wood for two important sources: to heat the farmhouse and program buildings; and for maple sugaring! We use chunky, split logs of firewood in our furnace. For maple sugaring, we need thin, flat pieces of slab wood to feed into our evaporator. All summer we have splitting and stacking wood to prepare for winter. In total we need over 60 pallets of firewood and about 30 pallets of slab wood to get us through the cold season - that’s a lot of wood!

Split firewood ready to be stacked and dried. We’ll use this wood in our furnace to heat the farmhouse and program building.

Pallets of stacked slab wood we’ll use this Spring in our evaporator to make maple syrup. The relatively small, thin pieces help us keep the fire at an even temperature and the sap boiling steadily.

We’ve already stacked quite a few pallets of slab wood for our sugaring season.

A small sea of slab wood is all that’s left to stack and should get us what we need for the sugaring season!