One hard lesson I learned was never to bring home more wood than you can process in a reasonable length of time before it goes bad.
Most of my osage is salvaged wood from other people's land clearing. Naturally I would haul off everything I saw about to be burned after getting permission from the landowner.
Several times my backyard looked like a log yard. Working shift work full time as well as tons of overtime left me with limited time to work on my wood pile. I have stripped bark and sapwood every day for a month until my hands were swollen like sausages.
At some point I had to stop, I couldn't take it anymore, not having a good place to store raw wood out of the weather I lost some piles of mighty fine wood to bugs and checking.
My new game plan became; "don't bring more wood home than you can handle in a few days". This has worked for me for the last 15 years and I haven't lost a stick of wood since.
Someone asked me about how to split osage so I took this gag picture telling them "you split osage logs until you pass out, when you come to, jump up and resume splitting".
This is some of the wood I lost part of by being overloaded, the picture only shows part of what I brought home.
