I’ve been looking half-heartedly for a while for an outdoor wood cookstove and finally snagged one off Craigslist.
This picture shows it with the top off (there are two cookplates) and the four foot chimney I added. The urgency to get it now revolves around wanting to try to make a small batch of maple syrup from the trees on our farm. I think it would be fun to go through the process to get some real maple syrup and it’s something all the kids could help with.
Making maple syrup would be a really neat thing to do with your kids. Probably a wasteful, inefficient activity in terms of today’s economics, but still I think a fun thing to produce a few quarts of syrup and some maple sugar. Kids surely should experience the making of them. Maple syrup on crunchy oatmeal in the morning is the highlight of my day.