We mostly heat our house using a woodburner. My son Michael loves to chop down trees and cut them into firewood and split it, all without using a drop of petrol. He is an axe and old woodsaw afficionado. I tell him that I can cut it a lot faster using my Husquavarna chainsaw and our gas operated splitter, really my brother's splitter that I have been "storing" for him for the past 10 years. However, he won't give in. I almost hate to burn the logs he produces; they seem like works of art to me. This winter our wood pile is entirely his creation.
The wood we use for firewood is mostly red maple and black cherry. We use the other woods available to us for other purposes.
This morning I cleaned out the woodburner and took the ash bin out to the old barnyard, that now is for berrries, trees, and our annual watermelon and canteloupe patch. I have two little beach plum trees that I've kind of overlooked for the past few years. The beach plum is native to the Eastern US. It grows to about 12 feet and gets a lot of small sized plums. They aren't so small that you can't fill up a bowl with them and put them on the table for your kids to eat whenever they want. They also require zero spraying around here, and they are delicious. The only thing you have to watch for is Japanese beetles, but if you pick them everyday, they bear for about a month, the beetles won't get them. They only like them when they are a bit overripe.
Anyway, the beach plums love wood ash. So I went out and scraped the snow from around their base with my boot, and made a nice circle about 2 feet in diameter around the trunk and dumped ashes about 2 inches deep into it. It was raining a bit as things are melting off a bit today, so the ashes will work into the soil nicely.
Some other things I use my wood ashes on during the winter are the asparagus patches and the rhubarb. Both of these love the ashes. I usually put a nice layer on/around them 2 or three times during the winter. I also put some nice fresh cow manure around them too around the end of fall. That way by spring it is worked in and I don't have to worry about any ecoli. The way my cattle are raised I don't really worry about it anyway. I think you could eat the stuff, but I have no desire to try. We usually just keep a wheelbarrow in the barn and we go out in the field around the water trough and scoop up any nice pies, and once we get a wheelbarrow full we use it somewhere in the yard/gardens & trees.
Another thing I use the wood ashes for is for sweet peas. Our soil is fairly acidic up here. bluberries grow wild, and I have never seen black raspberries grow like they do up here. These are ones that I plant in gardens, the deer will get them if they aren't fenced. I prune the black raspberries and red ones religiously, but they still grow to be six feet tall, I gave up on trying to keep them standard sized. They will get to be 8 feet tall if I miss some of them. And they are just loaded with berries. My kids live on them for about 2 months, the reds & blacks, in the summer.
The peas don't like acidic soil, so I always pick out where they are going to be in the garden next spring, and start dumping ashes there throughout the winter, The peas grow like crazy when they get their ashes.
I make sure I keep the wood ashes away from any of the berries and where the tomatoes will go next spring, they don't like them. But any tree or plant that likes sweet/basic soil will benefit from an ash deposit. I'm not very scientific about how much or how little to put down. I just use what I have, and try not to smother the rhubarb, it's always growing a bit through the winter down low and under the snow.
Wood ashes can also be dumped in places that your chickens can get to for a dust bath. They are said to prevent mites and lice. I have used this off and on with the chickens. I don't like putting them right into the coop, but if you have a place that is dry/under a roof that you can dump some ashes the chickens will bathe in them if they feel like it. Obviously you want to make sure there are no hot coals left in the ashes, and you would be suprised how long they can last in an ash bin. Since our chickens get out anytime the weather permits, they have plenty of their own dusty hangout to choose from.
If you have a woodburner, or like bonfires and roasting marshmallows, as long as you keep it clean, not garbage burning, your wood ashes are a valuable commodity around the farm.
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