Eight Acres

I love the gum trees on our property, but I only recently realised that so many of the trees ARE gum trees.  I was lucky enough to pick up a book called Gum: the story of eucalypts and their champions  by Ashley Hay (affiliate link), that our local library was selling off, so I only paid $2 for it, but its a great little book.  I was hoping to learn about gum trees and how to identify the different types, but instead I learnt about the complicated history of the taxonomy of gum trees.  Its a fascinating story, with chapters about Cook's botanist Joseph Banks, to Ferdinand Muller who continued Joseph's work and then May Gibbs, author of the gum tree baby comics and books.  Apparently there are hundreds of types of gum trees in Australia (and millions of gum trees) and they are all hardwood. They are great for firewood if the wood is split and allowed to dry out.  Some gum trees grow straight and tall, perfect for fence posts and building mate...

When we first moved into Eight Acres there was a massive pile of wood in one of the paddocks, and even though we knew it was a big job to clean it up, we were pleased to have access to free firewood.  I didn't take "before" photos of this pile, but I did take some part way through the clean up process.  It took us about a year to pick through all the logs and cut them into rounds.  They were branches from iron bark gum trees that were felled for fence posts by a previous tenant on our property. A kookaburra comes to help pick up bugs from the firewood pile As the branches had been in the pile for at least a few years we thought that the rounds would be ready to burn right away, but it seems that iron bark takes a little longer to dry out!  When Farmer Pete tried to split the rounds with an axe it just bounced off the log.  That's when we realised that the wood might need more time to dry.  We set up a wood pile using "besser blocks" to support a few s...