Another Gifted Tree

 A year and a half ago, someone took down a red oak and gave it to me.  Someone just a couple of weeks ago had a dead oak of some kind near his house, cut it down, and invited me to haul it off.  He cut it into max 6.5-foot lengths.

That enabled them to fit in the bed of the truck with the tailgate closed.  The tree was fairly small, so it fit easily into my log rack for bucking--and the individual segments were easy to handle even before cutting.

Bucking them only took 30 minutes or so.

It was described as being "dead but not rotten," and that looked pretty correct as I was bucking it.  But it's definitely not ready to throw in the stove next month. As I started to split it, some sections had the feel and smell of fresh oak, and the moisture meter gave readings of around 24% (though some were higher).  That's similar to the freshly cut (as of July) maple that I also have. Maybe by early 2023 some will be ready (if needed).

Dealing with Pines, Continued

Last summer I posted about removing a bunch of volunteer pines. It was hot sweaty work on a black flag day.  Later in the summer I cut a bunch more.

To my dismay, I saw that some (not all) of the pines have coppiced, i.e., they've sent out sprouts around the former main stem.  They're down but they're not out.  Glyphosate may be called for once things start growing again in the spring.

The biggest of the trees I cut down last summer were about two inches in diameter.    Shown below is one of the bigger stems.

This size is easily manageable with loppers.  When pines are neglected for a longer period of time, it's a different story.

I have some pines that, unnoticed by me, have grown up too close to a pole barn and they are now threatening the structure (or actually damaging it).  They have been growing on the back side for the most part.  In the years since I've had the property, they have grown to something twenty feet tall and up to eight or nine inches at the base.  These trees are more like 14-16 years old.

Felling them has not been too difficult so far, but things are crowded in the area where they are growing, so some have to be dropped and removed to make room to cut down others.  They were big enough that I wanted to buck them into firewood-length pieces as I hauled them out.

 Once they were on the ground, I used the Stihl chainsaw and timber jack to part them out.

You can see that the one growing closest to the back of the pole barn was so close I had to cut it off a couple of feet up from the ground.  At the base there wasn't enough room to get the chainsaw bar behind it. You can also see that the needles still look green and reasonably fresh--even though this picture was taken a couple of months after the tree was cut down.

Once the main stems were cut into 18-inch pieces, I hauled them out in a wheelbarrow.

The work is still ongoing.  I plan to split them into firewood; although pine is not highly valued in the east compared to hardwood, it has some value.  As previously noted, I also have a lot of tulip poplar on deck for next winter.  It is not much higher on the BTU-per-cord chart than pine (and may even be lower; some sites indicate that southern pine yields over 20 million BTUs per cord, which approaches 80-90% of what oak provides).  Some suggest that pine causes heavy creosote deposits--the rounds above exuded drops of sticky sap along all of the ring lines soon after cutting--but if seasoned and used in a hot fire, it can burn as cleanly as anything else.

Wood cutting

This is not an area where I can claim much expertise, but I have found a few things that work.  I have a wood-burning stove, and have wood from a variety of sources:  fallen dead trees, trees cut down because they're too close to the house or have other issues, and trees (usually dead) cut down by the power company because they are close to power lines.  The latter are usually cut into fireplace- or stove-length logs for me, but the others are very long and need to be sectioned.

 Shown above (the one on the left) is a tree that was leaning over the house last spring.  It was damaged in an ice storm, developing a crack in the main trunk, so I wanted to pull it down in a controlled way rather than risk having it break apart in a storm and fall on the house. So I asked someone to help me get it onto the ground.

Once it was down, it was as shown below.

 

It wasn't terribly large in diameter, but was pretty long and was blocking the area where I normally park, so it had to be cut up.  Below is a view from the other end.

It could be cut up with a manual saw, like a bow saw that can be bought at any hardware store.  However, it would take a lot of time and probably be pretty fatiguing to cut up that much oak by hand.  I used a chainsaw.  Since I don't use the saw very often, I have a battery-powered one (so I don't have to mess with 2-stroke engines, fuel stabilization, etc.).  Battery-powered saws are also a lot quieter.  Nice ones are made by Stihl, Husqvarna, Oregon, and others.

First I cut off most of the smaller limbs then began making cuts to the trunk, using cubits as a rough guide to length (my stove will take 20" logs).  Eventually I had just a long section of trunk and used a timber jack to lever it up off the ground for remaining cuts (I got mine at Northern Tool).

 

Timber jacks are easy to use.  Just set the hook, pull the lever toward the ground, and the trunk--even a very heavy one like this water oak--pivots up.  It starts to get harder to do as the remaining amount of trunk is reduced; eventually, some other support will be needed to do the last cut (like a saw horse or two concrete blocks).

The finished result (with some unrelated pine logs in front) is shown below.  It took less than an hour to cut the tree up (and as can be seen, the interior of the trunk was rotting).

From this point, to make firewood, the larger logs need to be split--using a gas-powered splitter, wedge and maul, axe, or other method.