On chilly nights, after he tucks 3-year-old Grace into bed, Mark Flory turns up the heat the old-fashioned way. He checks the flame in the downstairs stove, lifts the lid and pours in a big bucket of dried corn.
It could be a scene from a century-old farmhouse on the prairie. But Flory, his wife and their little girl live far from the American heartland in a congested suburb inside the Capital Beltway.
Nevertheless, like a small but growing number of homeowners nationwide, the Florys are keeping their Takoma Park house cozy this winter by burning dried, shelled corn. They belong to a Takoma Park corn-buying cooperative that's quickly attracting new members: It boasts 33 families and a storage silo in town.
Fed up with high heating bills, some homeowners are shutting off their furnaces and switching to stoves that burn fuels earlier generations used: coal, wood, feed corn, even cherry pits.
"It's a lot cheaper than natural gas," says Flory, 48, a state and local liaison for the Environmental Protection Agency, who heated his two-story brick house last winter with nothing more than $360 worth of corn.
The year might have gotten off to a balmy start, but stove dealers were doing a brisk business even before sudden snow squalls blew through the region yesterday and a significant storm began blanketing Western Maryland. As much as 10 inches of snow was forecast by early today for some ridgetop areas.
It's not just environmentally minded folks who are turning to organic fuels. Last fall, as natural gas and oil prices soared in the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, scores of worried homeowners around the country rushed to buy modern versions of the cast-iron stoves that first became popular during the 1970s energy crisis.
In Boyertown, Pa., near Philadelphia, Groff's Stove Shop doubled its sales of coal stoves, selling out all 40 by Christmas. In Council Bluffs, Iowa, Jerry and Betty Jackson's corn-stove dealership shipped 100 stoves to customers across the country; they're taking orders for next year. And in Western Maryland, Ed Bodmer sold off his floor models of stoves that burn wood pellets - uniformly sized chunks of compressed wood that burn far more efficiently than logs.
"They can't build them fast enough this year," says Bodmer, who had to return a few down payments when stoves took too long to arrive, something he hadn't done since he opened in 1978. Bodmer expects to get his first shipment of pellet stoves in a month but already has a waiting list.
