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.

Snow and Ice

Snow in north Georgia isn't all that rare, but entire winters can go by without any snow at all.  Freezing rain is about as common as snow.

The pictures immediately below show a recent two-inch snowfall in north Georgia. The mountains got more, up to seven inches.  Inside Atlanta, very little fell and it didn't really stick.

Most often when it snows at all, it's less than one inch.  This snow didn't last long: less than 24 hours.  It started to fall out of the trees within a couple of hours as it warmed up to the mid-30s.

The pictures below show the aftermath of a bout of freezing rain.  Sometimes ice can knock out power and bring things to a halt for a couple of days.  The trees shown are, in order, a crepe myrtle, a sweet gum, and a couple of flowering cherries.

More on Splitting Wood

I'm still having trouble with the sweetgum.  Some of those pieces just won't give up.  I have tried again with my manual splitter to no avail, and also got a heavy-duty wedge and tried pounding it in.

As you can see, the results were less than satisfactory. After taking the picture I pounded it farther in, and eventually had to use the sledge side of the maul to pound it back out after it failed to achieve the desired results.  For now, the piece remains unsplit. According to this site, it yields about 21 million BTU per cord, versus around 26 for oak.  That's certainly decent.  I do question the page's splitting rating of 'fair', however.  Or rather, if sweetgum is fair, I don't want to deal with elm or sycamore, the two species rated 'poor'.

I next put it back on the electric splitter to see if I might have weakened it enough to split it.  I did get it into two pieces (you can see the blue paint marks left by the wedge in the picture below) and I got one stove-sized piece to spall off, plus a few smaller kindling-sized chunks.  But as the picture also shows, it's not straight-grained.  It is splitting in a swirling pattern. 

A different site suggests splitting sweetgum when it is freshly-cut.  I did have that opportunity (although I didn't have the Boss splitter back when I first got it) but I didn't try.  So it's definitely well-seasoned now (although mostly gone, except for a few remaining large-diameter pieces).  To finish it off, I may see if I can find someone with a gas-powered 20-ton+ splitter.

I'd still take more sweetgum if offered to me, preferably about six inches in diameter or less.  That size both of my splitters can handle.  I'm not sure I'd jump too fast on sweetgum that was much larger than that.

On the other side of the splitting-ease scale is tulip poplar (listed in the chart as good).  My friend offered me some newly-felled poplar and I jumped on it.  I would've let it season before splitting, but he suggested I try it while still green (within a couple of days of being cut).  The results were surprising (to me).  It split pretty easily.  The small pieces more or less fell apart when I used the electric splitter on them, and even the larger-diameter pieces broke apart easily--but the larger chunks were pretty stringy.

The tulip poplar is lighter in weight and lighter in BTU content (17, only about 65% as much as oak--this is more like pine, which I also have some of waiting to be split). These factors probably mean that it will burn pretty fast, as the University of Kentucky site suggests. The small amount of pine I have burned so far has gone pretty quickly, but I do not have any experience with poplar or willow, two of the non-pine species that yield comparatively little heat per volume when burned.

In a relatively short amount of time I was able to split almost an entire pickup truck bed load. The stringy pieces were more time-consuming to split, but the split wood now has integral kindling.

I have never (as far as I am aware) split any of the woods listed as 'excellent' (black walnut, ash, and hemlock).  I do have some black walnut tree trimmings to cut to stove length, but they are small-diameter so won't need to be split. 

In the picture of the larger stack, the stringiness can be seen in some of the pieces.

Oak splits well when dry, but I also have some of that from a freshly-felled tree.  It's as stringy as the large-diameter poplar and not the easiest to split when wet.

Fall Colors-Seedling Edition

I've noticed this before, but small hardwood seedlings seem to turn later than mature trees and they hold their leaves longer.  Sometimes they can be very colorful.

Usually the leaves are somewhat smaller than full-size, though sometimes not by much.  Other times, they're tiny.

More on the Need to Inspect Cranberries

I haven't canned cranberries so far this year, but I did make a batch from a two-pound bag for Thanksgiving.  Although the bag of berries I started with looked pretty good, sorting through them over the course of 15-20 minutes revealed a lot that failed quality control.

As noted, I spent a little less than half an hour going through the two-pound bag.  So doing a canner load of eight pounds takes a while--actually, the sorting is the biggest single task, as noted before.

I didn't weigh the rejects this year, but overall the number was actually pretty low--probably better than I have documented previously.  Still, the rejects were a pretty wretched lot and would've tainted the finished product.  A closer look is below.

Sorting is an essential task. When I have done it poorly, the sauce has been noticeably impacted.  So far, I don't think I've ever had a bad canning batch.  I have, however, had flops with small lots consumed immediately.  It's worth paying attention to.

Cubing Bread for Stuffing

My stuffing recipe is pretty conventional.  I use wheat bread rather than cornbread.  I just use one pound of my basic sourdough.  There probably are easier ways to make bread cubes, but I just cut up a stack of three (or maybe four) slices.  There are usually about eight slices in one pound.

More than a few slices gets hard to handle, but three cuts well.  I slice them both directions; the stack usually holds together through most of the process although it can start to fall apart as more cuts are made.

Then the cubes themselves need to be baked at 350 for at least 20 minutes to dry it for stuffing.

Cutting up a pound of bread takes about 20 minutes, so the whole process lasts an hour or less.

This is one of the Thanksgiving Day chores--although it can be made at any time, I usually only do stuffing once per year.

Thoughts on Latex/Vinyl/Nitrile Gloves

I use these gloves for a variety of purposes--cleaning, kitchen work, painting, spraying insecticide or herbicide, and other uses.  I've had a variety of issues with them.  Sometimes they're hard to get on, particularly with sweaty hands, and they can tear easily.  I had very bad luck with some nitrile gloves I got at a big box store: many tore when I tried to put them on.  It was enough to make me rule out nitrile gloves for years.  I then went mostly with vinyl, because (although they aren't rated for medical use) they function well and don't have the too-tight issues that seem to be ubiquitous with latex gloves.

It may be that I was just using cheap gloves.  The ones I had problems with didn't have their thickness on the box, but they were probably pretty thin.  Nitrile is available in a wide variety of thicknesses: Uline sells them anywhere from 2 mil. to 12 mil.  Home Depot has 8 mil gloves as well as thinner ones.  In my limited experience, 6 mil. nitrile gloves are not at all prone to tearing.

Vinyl gloves are also sometimes susceptible to tearing, but in my (again) limited experience, anything 5 mil. or greater is strong enough for the uses to which I put them.

In the picture below, 5 mil. vinyl is on the left; 6 mil. nitrile is on the right.

Another factor to consider that impacts ease of putting them on is whether they're powdered inside.  I've found that powdered gloves help a lot when hands are sweaty.  Getting a glove on somewhat wet/tacky hands is almost impossible otherwise; if I have to attempt it, I usually dunk my hand in water to get it thoroughly wet rather than just moist.  That helps.  With powdered gloves, however, it's no problem.  Some don't like powder residue on their hands, so avoid powdered gloves. It's not a problem for me.

More detail on the uses to which I put them:

When painting, I sometimes use them to avoid issues with splatter or the otherwise inevitable paint-on-hands syndrome I seem to suffer from whenever I take a roller or brush in hand.

For cleaning, it's a best practice to use some sort of barrier when using cleaning solutions.  Reusable (e.g., Playtex) gloves are an option, but disposable ones work well, too.  It's also advisable when spraying herbicides or pesticides.

When cooking, cleanup after some tasks is much easier if gloves are used, such as greasing baking dishes with lard or tallow.

 So in summary, go thicker than the minimum and, if needed, look for powdered varieties.