The tree I cut uip today had leaves all over it, and "fruit" too.
I've never cut up a live tree before, only dead stuff that fell over because it was dead.
But the little chain saw went through this wood very quickly. IMO.
Before Ihrow the wood in the stream bed, does that mean it might be good as firewood, or would it have to sit for a year or two.
If I shouldn't throw it in a stream bed, dry most of the year, what should I do with it. I have enough firewood already and I can't babysit it for a year.
On Wed, 12 Jun 2013 01:38:48 -0400, micky wrote in Re Good for firewood?:
Yes, "green" wood generally cuts easier than seasoned (dry) wood.
Let it dry out for a year, preferably someplace protected from rain, but that isn't absolutely necessary.
Don't stack it in a stream bed. Stack it someplace with good drainage and the least exposure to wetness. The dryer the better, but just stacked out in the open where it can dry out after getting rained on will work. If you can cover it with a tarp after it's stacked it will dry better.
If, indeed, it was a cottonwood (see other note on identifying it for certain), the wood itself is virtually worthless for anything, including firewood.
If you're lucky somebody will be willing to haul it off...
Live trees are fine for firewood. It does take a while for it to dry enough to use. The shorter pieces you cut it in , the shorter will be the drying time as the wood dries mostly from the ends. You should be able to burn it in Jan or Feb and get some heat out of it if you cut it about 18 inches long. You can burn it sooner if you want,but it will not put off as much heat as you are still boiling off muchof the moisture in the wood.
If cutting down live trees, try to wait for all the leaves to fall off as the sap will run toward the roots and it will not be as wet and will not take as long to dry.
Even trees that are just cut down will burn, but you don't get as much heat and maybe more smoke.
Worthless for anything? There are a lot of people living out in the middle and west side of the country that will disagree. Value of any wood depends on where it it is. Were I in the Eastern US I wouildn't touch cottonwood as far better wood is available. May come as news to you but world in the Northern Hemisphere there is far more softwood than hardwood burned as hardwoods are not available.
FWIW that you apparently don't know. ALL wood contains approximately the same BTU per pound. Thus a pound of balsa will put out just as much heat as a pound of oak.
The reason why live wood is easier to cut than dry wood is because wood cells store H2O in two ways:
Inside the hollow cells there's a liquid which is mostly water, and
Inside the wood cell walls, gazillions of individual H2O molecules are weakly chemically bound to the layers of cellulose that make up the cell wall's thickness by hydrogen bonding. This is not liquid water but chemically bound up H2O molecules the same as you have in the gypsum core of drywall.
When wood dries, the liquid water inside the hollow cells is the first to evaporate, and that water evaporates (and is absorbed) 15 times faster at the wood end grain than across the wood grain. So, the fastest way to air dry a tree trunk is to cut it into thin disks.
After the liquid water evaporates, the chemically bound up H2O molecules in the wood cell walls are lost to the surrounding air. As that happens, the cell walls become thinner and stiffer, exactly the same way that a cellulose sponge gets thinner and stiffer as it dries out.
The thinning and stiffening of the wood cell walls makes dried wood harder and stronger than wet wood, but that harder and stronger wood is also harder to cut.
It's all the water in the live wood that makes it lousy for burning. Much (if not most) of the heat produced by burning the cellulose of the wood goes into boiling off (or otherwise driving out) the water from the wood.
Depends on the tree, and the locale, but my foot-thick oak wouldn't burn in a campfire within a month of cutting; but, a year later, it burned like it was nuclear power.
Here in the Silicon Valley, it's dry weather, so your locale may also make a difference.
There's (probably) nothing wrong with throwing it in a stream bed, (although here in California, you'd probably need a permit); but, I question why a stream bed? Why not just pile it alongside?
Or, is the point for the wood to float downstream, off your property?
I know quite a lot about cottonwood and wood scarcity, actually, living on the High Plains where the cottonwood is about the only thing there was (and precious few of them before turn of 20th century).
They were used some, yes, and there were even attempts early on to actually turn them into commercial lumber but all were _very_ shortlived.
That it does have a similar Btu content doesn't mean that it burns at all well and is much suited for firewood, either. It is similar to some of the other common trees in the area such as Siberian elm in that it produces a very high quantity of ash when burned.
From US Forest Products Laboratory...
I'll concede it is used some in small items such as containers and such where the white color lets it be stenciled easily and it does make a good pulp wood for paper for much the same reasons. How much is actually commercially consumed viz a viz other species I didn't look up but I suspect it's a pretty small fraction.
The tree itself (other than the nuisance cotton-shedding) is quite a nice shade tree and being akin to the aspens, the leaf rustling sounds are very pleasant in moderate to low breezes. Unfortunately, here in SW KS the days of only "moderate" wind aren't necessarily all that common altho today is pretty good, last to have been steady 30-40 mph gusting to 45+. Tomorrow is projected another at 30 or so ahead of the next front.
Presumed OP wasn't talking for campfire use...sure it'll burn (sorta') but in fireplace or stove you definitely won't like
a) the burn time, b) the difficulty of starting/keeping fire going, and c) the amount of ash to have to carry out.
All in all, if there's any thing else to choose from, you can almost be guaranteed it'll serve better than cottonwood. But yes, in really, really deprived wood locales folks will make do w/ what they have and some does get used here for the purpose. All in all as noted above, given the choice I take the trimmings of the Siberian elms for the use here over the cottonwood even and generally put the cottonwood trimmings in the burn pit rather than cutting it up.
I had no idea! It was worth asking for this fact alone.
I'm sorry. I should have said, "If I don't want it, before I throw it in the stream bed to get rid of it...." It was clear to me, but I see that it's totally unclear to a reader.
This didn't help. I meant if there is some environmental reason I shouldn't throw it in the stream bed.
I would but I have a 6' x 4' stack already and I'm not using much of it.
True, it would have been the fireplace, in the basement.
I have the previous tree that fell near my house, which I cut up and saved (been about a year now) plus there is another tree that fell the other direction, into the stream bed. Were I short of wood, I would have cut that one up. (not cottonwood, but I forget what it was)
Plus all the old rails and pickets from my fence (none that are treated)
Plus, the fireplace looked good to entertain girls, but since I don't do that anymore, it's less important. Still I enjoyed watching it myself, but I can't sit at my workbench and have a good view of the fire, and the pile of projects not yet finished has spread across the floor to where it is too close to the fireplace, so the fire need closer attention than it did.
Living near the stream is charming, insteresting, and nice in several ways, but the combination of being in a valley, even a little one (40 feet deep?) and having tall trees on two sides of me, means I think the breeze I get is nowhere near as much as people a couple blocks away get. I guess that's one reason in cowboy movies, or Kansas, people build their houses on the top of the hill.
(I now have a big table fan at the foot of my bed, and a 4" fan on the window sill above my head, so the lack of a breeze in the bedroom won't be such a problem this summer. .
He means that while the tree is standing, the sap will run toward the roots. I don't know that myself, but Ralph has never lied to me before. Maybe it relates to maple sap running in the fall (after the leaves are off?)
Maybe it relates to this: After I cut the part of the trunk resting on my woody bushes, it didn't fall anymore.
So I cut the main trunk near the edge of my yard. I didn't cut all the way through because I couldn't decide which way the cut-off part would go when it was free**. I left some uncut and then used a rope to pull on the trunk, When after cutting more the third time, I got it to break, at the uncut part, it ripped off about 6 feet of bark.
Under the bark, was an almost blemish free white layer that was positively wet. When I toucheed it my fingers got wet. The liquid was clear, but that was the sap, wasn't it?
I should have looked for xylem and phloem. The bark is still lthere but tomorrow will be two days of drying.
**It went straight down, but because of the way it was resting, I could see it sliding off the bushes towards me and putting a 1 or 2 inch dent in my chest, or knocking me off the ladder onto the picket fence.
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