What to do with an unwanted orchid?? (apples and stone fruits)

[Stephen N]

Hi there Just thought I would ask would anyone have any ideas on what to do with a large (100 000 + ) orchid?? My father was leasing out his property to some people and they went bankrupt Mainly apple trees and some stone fruit. I asked a friend who works at a papermill and they are the wrong sort of trees to make newspaper from but suggested perhaps cardboard manufacturers. The trees are 8 years old or thereabouts and I guess the average tree would be 10 foot tall. Would they be any good for timber?? I have a pic at

think these trees are a little smaller then most but not that much smaller Any use in making veneers or something?? Im guessing they might not be big enough This is in Australia Thanks for any replies Stephen Nixon

[Leon]

Ummm Do you mean orchard? An Orchid is a flower.

[Stephen N]

or dear i think i do mean orchard sorry thanks for pointing that out Leon Stephen

[Dave Balderstone]

Orchids are flowers. Large plantations of fruit trees are orchards.

You may want to take note of the proper terminology if you're serious about finding a buyer for your ORCHARD.

[cselby]

Now that the spelling police have had their say:

I spent the better part of a year trying to find applewood locally and on the 'net'. I finally took a ride east to Ottawa (that's in Canada) and stopped in at an orchard and got lucky. I wish your wood was over here. I'd buy it all. I can think of a whole lot of things to build with applewood. And other fruit woods.

Ask around locally with the wood turners, and hobbyists. You may even get lucky and find someone willing to lumberize the lot. Also some folks think applewood is great for smoking meats and fish. If you can find a wood chipper and bag the stuff, that may be all you need to do.

And I'm still looking for about 60 BF pearwood if anyone has some to sell within reasonable shipping distance to Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

Pete Selby

[Stephen N]

Thanks for the help there Pete I was thinking that the size of the trees wouldnt make it worthwhile to cut up for lumber. I have a pic at

. I promise it isnt a malicious file or something just a picture (with spelling error sorry). How big does a tree have to be to make it worthwhile to cut up?? I am a knifemaker by hobby so I will ask him to save me 1 or 2 trees for handles but thats a heck of a lot of wood for me because I dont need a large piece for handles. The trees are 200 km away so I cant get a better pic of them at the moment He is looking at a $85000 bill to buy a excevator thing (not exactly sure what sort of machine) to rip them up plus whatever it costs for fuel and time. He was just going to let them rot in the paddock after that Maybe I should get him to put an add in the local paper "free apple trees for lumber use, must remove all branches" or something like that would adding "must take 1000 trees minimum" work ??

8-) ok a wood related question - whats applewood look like when its dry and ready to use?? I had some pearwood and it looked pretty nice, pale with darker swirls. Is applewood similar?? I know that its fairly light coloured I havnt cut any up for handles yet. Apparently to kill them properly you have to paint the stump with roundup within 10 seconds after cutting them down or they will come back which makes it a little harder apple wood chips mighnt be a bad idea Googling apple wood chips came back with a lot of hits Stephen Nixon

[Andy Dingley]

Why not use them for fruit? You've already got them, the trees are mature enough to be producing well. Unless there's a sudden interest in using the land for anything else, an orchard has to be more use than a bare hillside.

10 years is a bit young for timber, as they'll be on the small side. This isn't a real problem for fruitwood, but it does reduce the yield/cost ratio. Usually fruitwood is felled from trees that are past their fruit-bearing prime, although even these never get particularly large. Fruitwood is valuable though and you should find buyers through the specialised timber trade dealing with turnery etc. supplies. Make sure you talk to them first about thier instructions for felling, what sizes they want and how they want the logs end-sealed etc. immediately after felling.

On the good side, felling orchards is pretty easy felling work. Well-behaved trees that aren't too big to handle.

[Doug Miller]

Seems to me that it hardly falls in the category of "spelling police" to point out that an orchid and an orchard are two very different things.

[WillR]

There is a wood dealer who goes to the Woodstock Woodshow (Ontario) --=20 he regularly has "exotic" local woods -- sumac, boxwood, pear, chestnut, =

apple, elm, yew or whatever falls down and is referred to him. You might =

want to check through the woodstock dealer list.

We got some bowl blanks from him this year. In the past I have bought=20 curly horse chestnut and german beech etc...

This year he was near the Carving demonstration area -- you could always =

call the show managers -- or maybe someone still has the show program=20 and recalls his name.

R. Jewel Boxes and Wood Art power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those=20 who have not got it.=94 George Bernard Shaw

[fredfighter]

FWIW, I have read that the applewood Diston and others traditionally used for saw totes was hawthorn, sometimes called crabapple.

Mind you, I've never seen a hawthorn big enough to make a tote.

That said, those who have used real applewood for tool handles seem to eb pretty happy with it. One such person turns chisel handles from the branches he prunes from his trees.

[Leon]

Yeah. ;~) he did not misspell Orchid.

[Mark & Juanita]

Looking at the picture, are the trees dead or just dormant because of the season the picture was taken?

Seems like a shame to destroy live trees (coming from the desert and originally from the eastern plains of Colorado where trees are a novelty, something inside me cringes when trees are just ripped out). Any chance they could still be used for their intended purpose?

+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ If you're gonna be dumb, you better be tough +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

[Robatoy]

What do you expect from Aussies? They think that 'Foster' spells 'beer'..

*grinning, running and ducking*

BTW.. That's a LOT of frickin' trees, Mr.Methane. Any relation Le Patomane?

Get a rig to 'pull' the trees, rather than cutting them and leaving the stump. There are a LOT of sheets of particle board sitting there.

[cselby]

Seems to me that the question was understood and that spelling (or word usage) should not have been an issue. Seems to me that the question deserved an answer (if you had one) and not a cheap shot. Seems to me that people who do this (here and in other news groups) are a waste of space.

I used to teach high school kids. It really irked the hell out of me when some pretentious know nothing sack of hot air, in the staffroom, missed the message and zeroed in on the small stuff.

Pete Selby

[marks542004]

You can take a chainsaw and trim the trees back to the trunk and then rent a backhoe to pull the stump. Fairly easy to do if you do not mind the really big hole.

If the trees are in good condition wouldn't it be better to find someone to do the maintenance and harvest the fruit.?

An 8 year old fruit tree is pretty young for a commercial orchard.

If you want to kill the stump cut the tree down, spray a herbicide on the stump. If that does not do the job you can drill some big holes and apply a product that sppeds up the decomposition of the wood. (commercial product whos name I don't remember.

You should be able to find a lumber company that can value the trees.

[W Canaday]

And it really bothers me when HS teachers dismiss the importance of literacy in at least one language. Were you, by some chance, the football coach?

By the way, your choice of words and ineptness with punctuation prove my point. There is exactly no need for commas around "in the staffroom" nor does the addition of profanity buttress your point. Any college level composition instructor would return the paper with just two words on it.

"Do over"

By the way, I used to teach HS dropouts to use computers to parse commands, develop spreadsheets, use wordprocessors and design databases. Every step of that process requires definiteness and precision. They had not been taught these things in high school. Were they perhaps former students of yours?

Sorry Pete, your defense of ignorance just grinds my guts.

Bill

[Andy Dingley]

Not, I hope, in any country where English was the native language.

Do _what_ over ?

[Andy Dingley]

Indeed. It's obviously an orchard. We don't cut much timber from orchids. No-one was confused by this typo, so who cares about highlighting it?

[canadian_woodworker]

Yes, they are different things. Of course if you had looked at the picture from the OP, im thinking its pretty obvious waht he meant. People do make mistakes!

[Dave Balderstone]

Substituting orchid for orchard is NOT a typo. It's a question of literacy.

Some people believe that literacy means something, Andy. I'm one of them.

djb