Don't Overlook Your Kindling Supply!!!!!

[Watchman]

For the first time ever, we ran out of kindling to use to start fires in our wood stove. We thought we had it covered but ran out early. I would say to concentrate as much on kindling as your main wood supply. Also, found out from an old friend that pine cones and dried roots from dead bushes, trees are also great for burning and/or starting fires.

[Toepopper]

I have 18 five-gallon buckets stuffed full of dry kindling. Without it, making a fire becomes very hard during the winter when everything is wet and hard to light. Also keep several boxes of a fire-starting material called "Firelight Timber Starter" which is a mixture of sawdust and wax and comes in wafers. This stuff makes starting your kindling a breeze and speeds up the overall fire-starting process. Always nice to have backup materials on hand. Usually we start a fire in late October and keep a fire going until February when we shut it down to clean the chimney. Once that chore is done we start another fire that burns into May, so our need for kindling is not that great. Our woodstove will burn for 40 hours so just adding more wood to it and opening up the air flow will get it going again.