Firewood

No Estonian with a country house and sauna can do without a woodshed full of firewood. Birch splits burn well with bright, welcoming sparks, and are highly prized. Any decent rural block comes with its own stand of birch trees, for sustainable harvesting. Other types of wood are also good; alder is one, and maple and ash would be others.

When visiting, our hosts would proudly show us their woodsheds - one we saw was the size of an aircraft hangar - or carefully stacked rows outside of drying timber. Wood is crucial to staying alive during winter, and looking at the size of some woodstoves we saw, the appetite for burning is ferocious.

Our dad spoke of a dreary winter in Tallinn early on during the war, he at home while grandma worked, having to stoke the fire from morning until night to stay alive. This was a dreadful chore for a small child, and led to his later spending time at the family farm in the northeast of Estonia, where he was not on his own.

Winter is the traditional time of year for gathering firewood; there’s not much else to do outside for rural folk, and having the summer months to dry out, one season’s harvest is ready for the next winter. The woodsheds are neat and tidy, cut wood all the same length stacked on well-made racks lining the walls. A work of art or sculpture, and one I have yet to learn.

The woodshed we built for the summer house in the Wairarapa is a tiny affair compared with the overseas counterpart, though strongly configured to resist the wind, and open to the north and east and with a slatted floor to dry wood quickly. I built a shelf in it to store spare construction timber and boxes of pinecones, and another out of an old bed head on which to put a coffee cup while admiring the view.

Back in Estonia, it goes without saying when it comes to felling a tree for firewood there is little waste. Smaller branches suit the carving of wooden spoons and other kitchen utensils, the bare twigs for kindling, birch bark as a fire starter, and the leftover stumps could be somewhere, I suppose, to put a thermos flask while at work in the forest.

The woodshed stands alongside the sauna house, the barn or granary, the well, the cellar, and the living quarters as essential to any traditional farmstead or talu.