All that ash!

This is exactly what we do. We save it over the winter to use when the drive gets full of ice, and then come spring, we spread it over the lawn.

When they have those huge forest fires, plant life thrives in regrowing though all of that ash, spreading it out over your land is a non issue.

One tip, dont do it on a windy day. Nothing to do with the land but rather your legs and eyes. One guess why I make that comment.

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Remember the good times, for they are fewer in number and easier to recall.

Our chickens love to dust themselves in the cool wood ashes....also the Llama, he cannot wait for me to dump them out, he will roll in them. Also spread a little in the garden.

That made me laugh! We use apple wood to smoke our meat. Kinda scarce out here, so would never use it for home heating.

I put down the ashes thick on places where I don't want grass/weeds to grow.Like the center of the drive,arround the edges. We have way too much to use on the garden.

I've never heard of this being done, but DH used wood ashes to rub on the fruit trees where the limbs got broken by the recent ice. He says the ash helps seal the bark until it can heal itself. Otherwise, wood ash has always been spread on the lawn here.

And I gotta go do me some reading on how to make a composting toilet, since we have the wood ash to help with the compost.

I know that fire places are about as inefficient as one can get, but apple makes a great fireplace wood. Most of the ash comes from the bark, there for cut up "sticks" of wood are going to have more ash. There is much less volume (wood) to surface area (bark) as the logs get smaller, large split wood of course has a much lower percentage of bark

The old timers would layer straw and ash in a wooden barrel with a tap in the bottom. They would let water slowly leach through the mixture and use the resultant "lye" with lard to make soap. The "lye" from wood ash is potassium hydroxide not sodium hydroxide (store lye) the soap made from it will be softer than the hard soap made from sodium hydroxide.

oh, and I forgot to say that DH and his friends all treat apple wood as precious timber since they use it in their smokers for hams and porkloins.