Black Spruce Firewood

Black spruce is the scrappy little tree of the northern woods. It grows in bogs, swamps, and rocky ground across the Northeast and Midwest where a lot of other species can't survive. Not pretty, not impressive, but tough as nails. And when it ends up in your wood pile, it's... fine. Just fine.

At 15.3 million BTU per cord and 2,465 lbs. dry, black spruce is middle of the road for softwoods. Nothing special, nothing terrible. It'll put out some heat, but you won't be bragging about it. If you're trying to figure out how many cords you'll need for the season, run the numbers through the heating calculator, you'll burn through spruce a lot faster than oak or maple.

Splitting is effortless. Small-diameter trunks, light wood, clean grain. You can process a whole pile of spruce in the time it takes to wrestle with one gnarly elm round. The sparks are the main hassle, black spruce pops and throws them, so screens are mandatory. Coal quality is poor, meaning the fire dies down quick once you stop feeding it.

Six to twelve months is all the seasoning time you need. The stuff is so light it dries fast, especially if you split and stack it right away. Not much fragrance to speak of. A slight smell, nothing like the nice piney scent you get from ponderosa.

Black spruce is a kindling champion and a passable shoulder-season wood. Mix it with denser hardwoods for winter heating and use it on its own for campfires and early fall evenings. If you want something similar but from the Rockies, look at Engelmann Spruce firewood.