Whats Your BIG 3?

[00wyk]

Agreed. I'll burn maple, but for me, it seasons really quick and doesn't last real long in the box. Great shoulder season wood or I burn it during the day when I'm home.

I helped a local FHC guy split wood one day. He had a small gum log bucked. It was ignorant. Just like this pic.

I think our spanish chestnut and Elm act similarly. Spanish Chestnut sparks an insane amount when it burns, too. Dangerously so. I don't bother with it.
In the PNW, Oregon and Washington, we mostly liked
Big Leaf Maple
Oak
Ash
Birch/Alder

Big leaf maple will burn unseasoned, and leaves beautiful coals

In Ireland:
Ash
Beech
Oak
Birch

Seasoned ash burns very hot, and is quick to ignite, so it's the starter wood unless I find a thin piece of very seasoned oak. Unseasoned ash burns hot too if it's thrown on top. Beech nearly the same, but burns faster. Oak will burn very hot and it will burn a long time. The last log on the fire is always a big oak log. Most birches burn well, but paper birch smells like sweet butter when it burns. almost like pastry and wood mixed together. Nothing quite like it. Just a very lovely smell. I save every piece of birch I find for myself if I can

I do firewood on 3 estates(one being the Seskin Farm across the Suir from us of O'Donnells tater chip fame). So a fair many trees are planted or transplanted and non native to beautify these large estates. I rarely fell trees that aren't danger trees. It's mostly clean up. Other woods we process include apple, cherry, pear, larch, firs of all types, rowans, sycamore/maple(though imported maples burn better than the local sycamores do), elm, lyme, poplar(AKA cottonwood), redwood(I never fell them, only harvest the limbs or windfall), madeira and continental cypress and pines, etc etc. It all burns when it's seasoned a few years. I use pitch pine to start a fire if we have it laying about - it's basically diesel in the shape of a pine. It takes 2-3 years for most woods to fully season here, as the humidity is rarely very low.

Big leaf maple in Oregon @sawfun will remember this tree:

What we fed all that to:

The Seskin estate:

A beautiful chunk of lyme? ash? the 281 cleaved in half:

Their boiler:

The Waterford Estate I mainly work:

And the Purcell Estate:

 

[RI Chevy]

Nice!!!

 

[Bob95065]

#1. Blue gum eucalyptus
#2 live oak
#3 red oak

Eucalyptus is my first choice. Grows tall and straight with branches at the top. Few knots and easy to split green. If you let it dry it's hard as steel. Stacks tight and drys in three months. Burns hotter then oak and leaves less ash.

The live oaks around here burn hot but the branches are all twisted. Hard to split and hard to stack.

I usually cut up down or problem trees. I'll burn whatever I can get my hands on. I always say it all looks the same when it comes out of the stove

 

[CrystalRiver1]

I think our spanish chestnut and Elm act similarly. Spanish Chestnut sparks an insane amount when it burns, too. Dangerously so. I don't bother with it.
In the PNW, Oregon and Washington, we mostly liked
Big Leaf Maple
Oak
Ash
Birch/Alder

Big leaf maple will burn unseasoned, and leaves beautiful coals

In Ireland:
Ash
Beech
Oak
Birch

Seasoned ash burns very hot, and is quick to ignite, so it's the starter wood unless I find a thin piece of very seasoned oak. Unseasoned ash burns hot too if it's thrown on top. Beech nearly the same, but burns faster. Oak will burn very hot and it will burn a long time. The last log on the fire is always a big oak log. Most birches burn well, but paper birch smells like sweet butter when it burns. almost like pastry and wood mixed together. Nothing quite like it. Just a very lovely smell. I save every piece of birch I find for myself if I can

I do firewood on 3 estates(one being the Seskin Farm across the Suir from us of O'Donnells tater chip fame). So a fair many trees are planted or transplanted and non native to beautify these large estates. I rarely fell trees that aren't danger trees. It's mostly clean up. Other woods we process include apple, cherry, pear, larch, firs of all types, rowans, sycamore/maple(though imported maples burn better than the local sycamores do), elm, lyme, poplar(AKA cottonwood), redwood(I never fell them, only harvest the limbs or windfall), madeira and continental cypress and pines, etc etc. It all burns when it's seasoned a few years. I use pitch pine to start a fire if we have it laying about - it's basically diesel in the shape of a pine. It takes 2-3 years for most woods to fully season here, as the humidity is rarely very low.

Big leaf maple in Oregon @sawfun will remember this tree:

What we fed all that to:

The Seskin estate:

A beautiful chunk of lyme? ash? the 281 cleaved in half:

Their boiler:

The Waterford Estate I mainly work:

And the Purcell Estate:

Man...that's almost surreal!

 

[00wyk]

Man...that's almost surreal!

I'm purdy good at managing and making firewood.
On these old estates, one of which is nearly 400 years old, the trees get huge before they succumb. I just clean them up.
We had two, 350 year old oaks fall over in a storm. I started on them five years ago, and there's still several pieces left to cut up. I had to do the fallen beech first as they rot much more readily. The beaches were rather large as well. Most larger than this one I felled due to it starting to drop its limbs.

And one of the oaks that fell being processed. We have to clear the fields because we use them mainly for cattle and tractors have to have access to them. So the wood is sometimes stored elsewhere before it's made in to firewood. I take it away in as big a piece as I dare.

One of the barns we used to store the wood:

Oak can sit around a long while before it rots.

 

[00wyk]

Let's talk about the worst wood you could possibly have for fire wood, can we?

This is a Horse Chestnut. Aesculus hippocastanum. They can grow very big, up to 130'! And that size isn't rare at all on old estates. They are absolutely gorgeous trees, with a beautiful canopy and one of the most impressive buddings/flowerings you will ever see on a tree - whites, reds, pinks everywhere. Like a super cherry blossom from hell. It's a hermaphrodite, so yer gonna get flowers from every tree you see. Very impressive when you have a row of them like you see in the second pic on the right. So, that makes them very popular on these large estates. But it also brings a lot of problems. They aren't very wind strong, and lose limbs readily in storms. There's a couple of insects that absolutely ravage the canopies, often killing them prematurely. And when they do die, the wood is absolutely good for nothing other than fertilizer. And it doesn't even do that very well. I mainly use them for making sawdust for the stables. Which they do very well.
Since they are often huge when they die, it is a lot of work to find somewhere else for all that worthless wood to be. I can spend days on some of the larger specimens chunking them down in to manageable bits, and then days trying to find places on the estate to hide it all. The good news is it rots quick.

A view from the opposite direction:

To give you an idea how I feel about these trees, I could not find a single photo of them flowering that I took myself. That's basically my attitude about them. Sad, tho, as they are gorgeous when they flower. You can do a search for them on line if ya wanna see one.

This one decided to simply lean over and die:

Where am I gonna stuff all this junk?(she said)

I'll leave ya with a nice estate view and some firewood pics:

Looking north west I think from the top of one of the fields.

About a tenth of one of the oaks processed:

How we move it around:

And one of the reasons I use semi chisel. This is a fully seasoned chunk of oak. We can't simply let it go to waste, or block the tractors working the field. It got swept up in to one of the fields after a storm. It is filthy, full of dirt and crap(and rocks!), and I easily cut it all up with that 281xp without needing to resharpen the chain.

That filthy oak being processed:

Making sawdust for the stables out of some worthless tree:

 

[Spike60]

Wow! Thanks for the tour.

I visited Ireland in 1993 for a 10 day vacation. Beautiful over there.

 

[CrystalRiver1]

Let's talk about the worst wood you could possibly have for fire wood, can we?

This is a Horse Chestnut. Aesculus hippocastanum. They can grow very big, up to 130'! And that size isn't rare at all on old estates. They are absolutely gorgeous trees, with a beautiful canopy and one of the most impressive buddings/flowerings you will ever see on a tree - whites, reds, pinks everywhere. Like a super cherry blossom from hell. It's a hermaphrodite, so yer gonna get flowers from every tree you see. Very impressive when you have a row of them like you see in the second pic on the right. So, that makes them very popular on these large estates. But it also brings a lot of problems. They aren't very wind strong, and lose limbs readily in storms. There's a couple of insects that absolutely ravage the canopies, often killing them prematurely. And when they do die, the wood is absolutely good for nothing other than fertilizer. And it doesn't even do that very well. I mainly use them for making sawdust for the stables. Which they do very well.
Since they are often huge when they die, it is a lot of work to find somewhere else for all that worthless wood to be. I can spend days on some of the larger specimens chunking them down in to manageable bits, and then days trying to find places on the estate to hide it all. The good news is it rots quick.

A view from the opposite direction:

To give you an idea how I feel about these trees, I could not find a single photo of them flowering that I took myself. That's basically my attitude about them. Sad, tho, as they are gorgeous when they flower. You can do a search for them on line if ya wanna see one.

This one decided to simply lean over and die:

Where am I gonna stuff all this junk?(she said)

I'll leave ya with a nice estate view and some firewood pics:

Looking north west I think from the top of one of the fields.

About a tenth of one of the oaks processed:

How we move it around:

And one of the reasons I use semi chisel. This is a fully seasoned chunk of oak. We can't simply let it go to waste, or block the tractors working the field. It got swept up in to one of the fields after a storm. It is filthy, full of dirt and crap(and rocks!), and I easily cut it all up with that 281xp without needing to resharpen the chain.

That filthy oak being processed:

Making sawdust for the stables out of some worthless tree:

What is BTU numbers on it & can you at least mix it in with other good wood and recover some time/labor.
There are folks who mix willow, cottonwood, and piss elm with osage orange, locust, and iron wood...not a complaint.

 

[hoskvarna]

Not my choice of wood but I have been burning maple and cottonwood and hackberry.
The boiler doesn’t care
Boss had 6 dump trailer loads of odds and ends that he wanted cleaned up.
Free wood [emoji106]


Sent from Hoskey Hills

 

[00wyk]

What is BTU numbers on it & can you at least mix it in with other good wood and recover some time/labor.
There wre folks who mix willow, cottonwood, and piss elm with osage orange, locust, and iron wood...not a complaint.

No complaint taken.
It's all about management for me. I'll clarify things a bit here:
I am not the head of a crew here. I am the sole forester and woodsman on this estate, and I work it part time. I'm not a firewood salesman. At least not most of the time.
At any given time, we have dozens of trees down on the estate. Maybe hundreds. I often find mature ash trees just laying there on the ground. Would you bother to process a wood that almost doesn't burn well, even seasoned, instead of spending that time on something that burns well unseasoned that is laying on the ground not far from it? We have no shortage of wood. I still have two monster oaks in fields that they are pushing me to clear. The weather hasn't allowed me near them. I can go out and cut them, but no tractor can reach them until the soil dries. I also have a plantation of ash I am to thin. About a two week job for one slow old man. I haven't even touched it yet. And that's an almost decent paying job on the Purcell estate. And every bit of that ash will be ready to burn well by next winter. I got to get to that before they bloom. I rarely get paying jobs nowadays in forestry. I work the estate because I am distantly related - not well paid. It's nearly an obligation. And it's really a lot of fun. Being here makes you want to do this work.

How often do you have a neighbor that owns a castle?

I may be the woodsman, but this guy is the huntsman. He keeps the deer off the estate. He was impressed when he first showed me hsi guns and I told him exactly what he had. He momentarily forgot I was a Texan. Anyways, here he is sitting on one of the oaks to give you an idea about the sizes. Yes, that dude is Texas size himself. But he's lost a lot weight recently - so don't judge!

A 60 foot ash that just fell on the ground one day and asked me to take it to be burned.

I couldn't find a pic of this thing before it fell, but it was a pretty big ash:

One of the redwoods on the proeprty:

Keeping the roads clear(that's a Waterford council crew behind me). The road used to be owned by the estate, and is now a county road. So we often work together when it has issues like this. I also try to keep them from poaching the wood if I can. It's not terribly neighbourly, but it does belong to the estate after all. And that is a nice piece of Beech.

Every 30 years or so, we have massive floods as the Suir bursts it's bounds. The estate's northern most border is the river Suir. In this pic, in the far distance, are both teh Purcell and Seskin estates. But I took the pics to show how much the river floods.

And during the last bad flood, and an explanation of how huge oaks can fall. That water will wash away a semi truck.

This is one of the oldest Ashes in Ireland, and one of the largest. It sits on a high spot on the estate near the castle property(a 13 acre enclave within our own estate), so hasn't been felled for the rain yet. It's about 350 years old and 8 foot wide DBH. It's days are numbered, tho. Which will be a sad thing. But I have a feeling it will outlive me. I leave a ring of nettle at the base, so the cattle and other animals and people mostly leave it alone without me having to ring it with wire. Cows won't eat nettles or even stand near it. So you see it in a few of my photos of the larger trees in fields.

 

[RI Chevy]

Wow. Really cool! Love these posts

 

[CrystalRiver1]

I get it...always a blessing to have options...looks like you've got plenty.

 

[00wyk]

What is BTU numbers on it & can you at least mix it in with other good wood and recover some time/labor.
There are folks who mix willow, cottonwood, and piss elm with osage orange, locust, and iron wood...not a complaint.

I should probably respond to the BTU question directly. I couldn't even find a BTU measurement for it, which prolly says a lot. I mean, even American Chestnut, which is a freakin great wood to work with to make furniture etc, doesn't even burn as well as Douglas Fir does. And that wood is great compared to HC.

But horse chestnut can be used fully seasoned in wood stoves as it tends to spit a bit and stink when it does burn. There's only one fully contained wood stove on the property. The other two stoves are AGA's. Like an actual stove you can cook on as well as heat the house - so you don't want the smell of horse chestnut in those either. And the fully contained wood stove only burns one wood - oak.

When horse chestnut burns, it releases a sickly sweet smell, low heat, and it burns fast. But only if it is placed on a fire with a lot of heat in it already, and only if it is fully seasoned a couple of years. If you throw a large piece of HC on something like oak coals, it will smolder for a bit before it ignites, causing an even worse smell. So it is not for open fires at all. It is sort of the anti birch of firewood. Smells bad and burns poorly.

But it also has other issues. One of the things killing a lot of our HC's is the Greek HC moth. It's infecting the HC's in Ireland and the UK. It lays it's larva on the leaves and it ravages them, sometimes making the trees shut down as early as August. Then you have the canker. It is a bacterial or occasionally a fungal infection that basically eats the wood. I have seen a few cankers on the spruce we have near the HC's on the estates. The stuff is airbourne. It seems to only affect spruce a tiny amount compared to the HC's, tho. So, between the two of these, since I make wood fall our firewood, horse chestnuts are usually in poor condition to begin with. The last thing I want to do is make that bacteria or fungus air bourne, if I can help it. Best to take it to our organic landfill by the river and bury it.
That infection makes HC wood fall rot very fast. It also prevents me from drying it in other wood. I haven't seen it spread after the tree dies, but why chance it spreading and rotting other wood you are trying to season?
And, on top of all this, because of the canker, if I am going to use that saw on something else after I cut up HC, I have to completely clean the thing until it looks new from bar to chain to chassis, to prevent transfer of the bacteria to whatever else I am cutting. So, it's a bit of a pain. And, because of this, I often let the HC lie until it fully rots if it isn't making things ugly, and then move the broken bits to the landfill.

A guy on an estate in england explains it:

Wow, I found a pic of some HC I shoved aside to rot:

 

[CrystalRiver1]

Hedge apple, Shag bark Hickory, and Oak. Tough decision as to which one. Red oak is excellent at leaving a nice flat bed of fine ash instead of holding its form and leaving big clumps. I really like that, but hickory has more energy, and burns better when wet, and the bark is an energy dense kindling, though not easy to light. Then Hedge isn't too hard to light, and burns a long time. Hickory attracts borers, and the bark can hide several bugs and spiders.

I wouldn't mind having just red oak.

How long does Red Oak take to season up your way?

 

[RI Chevy]

Usually a year or so up here Reggie.

 

[Wolverine]

At least 2 years for me. And my stacks get full sun and great wind exposure.

 

[RI Chevy]

True Jason. 2 years is better than 1. But you could burn it after probably. I have been doing some experimenting with stacking. If i stack wood in single stack, it dries much quicker than in my lean-to with multiple stacks. Better air flow I think. And from both sides.

 

[Nutball]

How long does Red Oak take to season up your way?

I haven't paid attention, getting good firewood is highly variable for me, and usually isn't oak, then it normally sits in the shade maybe with a tarp, but often times not. I'm about to put up a canopy for keeping firewood under. I know even small pieces of split hickory will still look wet and green in the middle even after a year or so, but the end 3-4 inches will be dry.

 

[Al Smith]

I took a walk about yesterday with a can of spray paint marking dead trees .Three big hickories ,two shag bark and one bitternut that must be three feet in diameter .The two shags have a bunch of widow makers so I might let the weather work on them a little longer .The bitter nut has a hard lean so it's only going the fall one way .I'm going to need to snake out about 85 feet of chain and use the dozer to retrieve it .I've got oodles of chain .
I won't get to it until maybe December .I still have about 4-5 cords of oak to split and stack until then .I'm retired and in no hurry to do much of any thing fast these days .

 

[Al Smith]

Now hickory .As per a local sawmill they tell me that bitter nut, often called smooth bark is what you want if you are going to cut lumber .It's a second cousin to pecan and has a nice light brown tint to it .I've got a spar from a wind blown top about 40-45 feet tall that will probably stand by itself for a couple more years before the bark starts to shed .That thing has to have at least 1500 bd feet in the log ,nice and straight .