I cant beleive you guys can be arsed to separate it. I worked out that our pile is roughly 80% hardwood and so thats how I advertise it, not only do I have no complaints but I have had several letters from satisfied customers. I find splitting it green is the key and if you do that and store it somwhere windy almost any timber will dry in a year, I find the really wet stuff like willow and poplar dry really fast once split, Cherry takes longest it seems.
If you burn wood properly on a stove, softwood is fine and lasts plenty long enough, I can easily keep my rayburn in all night on leylandii or spruce. To burn properly you need to fill the stove each time, not put one log on now and again, after each fill burn rapidly for 20-30 mins to drive off any moisture and volatile chemicals like tar. This rapid burn keeps the flue hot and helps prevent the tar from condensing untill it reaches the open air. Burning with the door open will slow this process down and cool the flue as well as sucking the warm air from your room. Once the 30 mins is up close down the air supply as the remaining wood should now be charcoal and will burn slowly without taring up the flue.
All wood will give off tar while it burns, modern stoves with secondary air supplies are designed to burn off this tar as it is produced, however if the wood is wet the stove can not reach the required temperature to burn this tar. Conifers contain more resin than hardwoods but resin and tar are quite different things, wet hardwoods will produce more tar than dry conifer.
My mum who lives in Yorkshire keeps asking me to take logs down to her as the stuff she gets is poor, this is a major pita as I'd far rather visit her in the car than the landy. Her local guy sells hardwood that feels really dry but once split is still really wet in the middle, the bark is still well stuck on which is a giveaway. I reckon it must be cut, split and then stored indoors so the outside drys fast and makes them feel dry when they're not.
If anyone can supply small dry logs in Wetwang let me know LOL.