Lighter Wood

I have a new hobby and my husband thinks I am crazy.  I love to look for lighter wood (some people call it fat lighter) when we are going through the woods.  I am sure my husband is sorry he ever showed me how to look for it.

Lighter wood is what is left in the ground of an old pine tree that has fallen over.  After it has aged for so long, this wood is great for starting fires.  It is better than lighter fluid.  I find 1-2 stumps every time we walk through the woods.  My husband has had to give some of it away LOL.  People are so excited when we give it to them though. 

To find it, you look for really old pine stumps in the woods.  They can be little or huge.  I like to pick the ones that I can get by myself without help.  It is usually mostly detached from the earth, but you usually have to wiggle it back and forth and then pull it up.  There is a good bit that is in the ground up under the stump.

Here is the most recent one we found:

Now that just looks like an old rotten piece of wood right?  Wrong.  My husband calls it wooden gold.  If you pull a piece back, you can see that it is a lighter stump. 

You can also smell right away a very, very strong pine scent.  My husband breaks it into smaller pieces with an axe to use for starting fires.  You only need a small piece to start a fire.

I also think it's neat to find things like this in the woods.  Old rotten stumps I normally would have just passed on by are actually very valuable little things that we could use to start a fire.  And if the power goes out, we have this lighter wood that will make it so much easier to use for fires.  Now I just need to figure out a nice dry spot to store these.

This post is linked to The Homestead Revival Barn Hop