Fair wood for your fire

 

On Friday Pete Smyth, Fair Wood’s manager, came back to the Fair Food warehouse with a truckload of firewood (that’s it above).

After Pete unloaded the four and a half tons of firewood by hand he was heard to say, “I am very tired now.”

Pete has been wanting to stock sustainable firewood for a while– first because there are problems with harvesting our native forests for firewood.

Back in 2013 The Victorian National Parks Association called out an irreconcilable difference in the practices of the native firewood industry….

“Collecting firewood from the forest is a great Aussie tradition, but what we see as ‘dead wood’ and fuel, birds, mammals and insects use as shelter and food sources.”

The industry has been trying to clean up its act but just North of Melbourne something seems to be rotten in the Strathbogie State Forest.

Last year local environment group, Our Strathbogie Forest, blew the whistle on VicForestssaying its primary business seemed to be sending perfectly good hardwood saw logs from the pristine Barjarg Flat Forest to be sold as low-value firewood.

Pete’s other reason for stocking sustainable firewood came from hearing farm-foresters and millers complaining about the mountains of mill off-cuts and plantation thinnings they were burning because they didn’t have anyone to buy them.

Hence Pete’s truckload of four and half tonnes of mill off-cuts from Moama Sawmill.

Like all sawmillers, Glen Mulverhill’s Moama Sawmill creates an ever-growing pile of mill offcuts.

Glen has bagged us up a mix of grey box & yellow gum from timber he salvaged and milled out of a housing development in Bendigo, which he’s combined with red gum he salvaged from a farm tree downed in a storm.

We’re trialling a load of Glen’s firewood and next we’ll be looking at sourcing sugar gum thinnings from a plantation near Ballarat.

Our 15kg bags of Moama Sawmill off-cuts are dry, dense, slow burning hardwoods, cut to size and ready to go into the fire

We’ve priced them at $22 a bag which we’ll deliver free with your Fair Food order.

And if you’d like a ton or more get just in touch with Pete on fairwood@ceres.org.au
 

No box left behind

 

I keep reading horrific articles about our broken recycling system – help us reuse all the packaging we send to you by leaving it out at home or at your Food Host for our drivers to pick up.

That includes – all the cardboard boxes, eskies and frozen ice bottles.

As long as they’re clean and in tact we’ll keep using them as many times as possible.

Have a great week

Chris