The Daily Firewood Picture Thread

[g_man]

I like beech too. Split good and dry good. Mine have BBD and most tend to have tight compact tops like an arm sticking up with a closed fist. They are number one on my list mostly because of the BBD.

gg

[Wlmedley]

Granite, I've burnt quite a bit of it over the years but I've found that it's heavy when green and pretty light when it drys out. Doesn't seem to burn as long as oak or hickory. One thing I do like is that it's clean. Wouldn't want my woodshed full of it but mixed with hickory it should be fine.G man the ones up here have a thousand little limbs and are about the hardest tree tops to stack on a brush pile that there are. I'd rather stack pine limbs.

[SwampDonkey]

I wonder what kind of beech we are talking about. I never find it is all that light when dry. Every bit as heavy as oak. Oak is heavier when it's green though. We can't get good beech around here much, it's half dead and a lot of rot because of BBD. I cut one down in the yard, the top was dying out and it was all scabbed up with BBD. That'll be some nice hot firewood next winter. I got it before it started to rot. But had deep inclusions into the wood from the BBD.

I hate thinning with a clearing saw in beech though. Like working in barbed wire, the stuff won't fall like maple will. And there can be some nasty thickets of it. They'll tear a cotton work shirt up with them thorny buds and twigs. Darned stuff. Only thing worst is thinning jack pines.  20 ft long limbs from the ground up. They plant them too open, never make a sawlog with any of them.

[Wlmedley]

I had to look up BBD. Hasn't hit here yet. Most of the really large beech here are hollow and I've had some on my place explode when the tops get so big and heavy that the trunk can no longer support them. Makes a big mess.

[barbender]

No beech here. It looks like the Wisconsin coast of Lake Michigan is as far west as it grows.

[Wlmedley]

Being I had my Beech on the ground I started on one of the Hickory's I needed to cut. Bought a throw bag and small rope so I could get a pull cable attached to the tree. I'm right handed and my right shoulder is worn out. Found out that I can't throw very good with my left hand. I was worn out by the time I got my cable hooked up and ran to a snatch block further up the hill. Started cutting and found out tree was hollow even though it looked healthy enough. Picture shows results. I decided to quit for today. At least I don't have to worry about it falling on my garage which it probably would have eventually have done from the looks of it.

[Wlmedley]

Pretty good size hickory. Will make some good firewood once I figure out how to get it the rest of the way down.

[thecfarm]

The beech you have looks good. Even at the size you have, there are scabs all over the bark here on my land.
I have cut some big beech, old ones too. But have not really seen the scabs go into the wood. Very common for it to be rotted hearted, with no heart for a few feet and then good wood. I burned a lot of it one winter. I found it was hard to split.

[Wlmedley]

So far the beech up here seems healthy and I've got quite a few trees but you're right it doesn't split easily or straight. The squirrels love them though.

[SwampDonkey]

Black bears love them to, the nuts. They do to the tops what they do to a red oak. Make a 'nest', breaking off limbs for the nuts. Monkey bears.    When I cut a year ago along the road, I left a beech I seen on the bank of the road. It was only about 20" tall. Future monkey bear tree. They've already got a red oak ripped to pieces along the road. The only black cherry I have on the place, well forget about any logs from that tree. :D

[cutterboy]

Bill, there is some nice firewood in that hickory. Unfortunately, hung up hickory trees can be difficult to get down. The small top branches are very clingy.

Question: Is it unusual for you to have bare ground this time of year? I thought that up in the hills you would get snow from time to time.

[cutterboy]

Some pictures of beech trees with BBD. Half of my trees have it and half don't.




In the next picture the tree on the right has BBD and the big tree in the middle is a 30" beech that died quite suddenly. One year it seemed very much alive and the next year it didn't put out any leaves.


BTW, my beech doesn't split easily either....Cutter

[thecfarm]

I think I only have one beech tree without scrabs.
I had to look at the leaves to figure out what kind of tree it was. 
I have the tractor plugged in and chaps are hanging up in the back of the OWB getting warmed up too.
I will be cutting up some dead pine for firewood.

[SwampDonkey]

The inclusions of BBD get deeper as the tree heals and puts on diameter, the scars don't close and smooth over like they would with an axe scar. Beech is also a tree that can form buds around a scar or a cut stump or injured roots. Some places it forms thickets off root suckers.

[g_man]

I had one w/o scabs that I thought must be resistant because all the near by beech were loaded. The June 2016 I saw it covered with the white secretions of the Beech Scale insect. Hard to see but the tree to the right of it is all scabbed up and typical.





That October I saw that the Nectria fungus that gets into the pores that the Beech Scale make had started to bloom orange and red. That fungus is the cause of BBD. But the "harmless" Beech Scale bugs have to poke there holes first before the fungus can enter the tree.





The tree died several years later and became firewood. I guess I'm lucky my Beech splits so good !

gg

[SwampDonkey]

My beech in the yard was good for 25 years, then probably 15 years ago I started seeing the signs, first with the scale. Used to see smooth beech like that one was in among the diseased ones, just figured it was lucky for awhile. I remember one was about 25". But uncle loved beech for firewood, so that's where it ended up before any scale got to it. I cruised a whole grove of old growth beech once, north of here. Barrel sized stuff, still smooth. That's potato field now.

[Al_Smith]

That hung up hickory will come down .Hook a tractor to it with a long cable and give it a tug .Depending on your skill level you could "fence post" it down but be carefull doing it .

[Old Greenhorn]

We don't have much beech at my elevation, but what we have ain't much to speak of. Run it through the processor and send it.
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I have mentioned elsewhere that this has been my worst year for firewood in the last 20, I just blew my time on other things and with less energy I entered the heating season in terrible shape. Plus I have a snowflake neighbor giving me crap about smoke from my shop stove and I don't want to deal with him or even see his face. My house stove still runs 24/7 and if he gives me grief on that one he's gonna see how ugly an old man can get pretty quick. But her we are in early February and I am 'hand to mouthing' my fire wood, using the shop wood for the house but really running low on well dried wood.
 My buddy Bill came up with a solution. He has a about 20 acres or more of marsh/swap/pond he bought about 3 years ago. In that time it has never really frozen hard, but now it is. The edges are filled with dead standing wood, really LTD (Long Time Dead) wood. He would like to clean that stuff up. These trees get killed when they get flooded out with water and there are hundreds of them. So today we went down to a section he would like to make into dry land and grade out at some point. It is more like marshy hillocks. Tough walking when frozen, worse when thawed. We whacked down a half dozen of these pecker poles, picking the smallest first at about 8" on the stump, some were 10". They are dry as a bone and stove ready, just the bottom foot or so holds moisture. We filled my pickup in less than an hour. There are maybe 20 rounds that I split when I got home to let dry more, the rest went in the shop and house and what I couldn't fit went on the pile. I would say nearly a weeks wood for one stove.
 We figured out the best process and now it's like going to the grocery store to get wood. Drop 'em, throw a chain on, drag them to the road and either buck them next to the truck or lift them up onto the tailgate and buck them in the bed as we feed them in. s long as that swamp stays frozen I am good. I just have to go down one day a week. If we see a thaw coming, I'll yank a bunch of these small stems and bank them in a dry spot to buck as I get time.
 But I have to start cutting mushroom logs soon. I have orders for nearly 500 now.

[Wlmedley]

Cutter, wintertime up here is highly unpredictable. Snow covered the ground for almost the entire month of January but it's all gone now and we may or may not get any more to amount to any thing. Last winter we hardly had any and several years ago the ground was covered from Christmas until March. A couple hours drive north of where I live the Winters are a lot worse. I used to work in that part of the state and they always had a lot more snow. I'll eventually get that hickory on the ground if it ever quits raining 

[Wlmedley]

Had a pretty strong storm come through last night and the wind must have pushed my tree off the stump.Problem is that the ground is no longer frozen and the butt just jammed in the dirt. Tried Al's method of using a long cable hooked to the tractor but my small tractor wouldn't budge it. Tried something different with my log arch and although I was a little leary it worked pretty well. Got three nice 12' logs and should get quite a bit out of the top. Wish it would freeze up some but it doesn't look like it is going to. Got some more to cut but hopefully I have enough openings to avoid any more hang ups.

[Wlmedley]

[barbender]

Although I have no love for the extreme cold we get up here, I think the frozen ground conditions we have make up for it versus the muck many of you have to work with all winter.

[Al_Smith]

Well unless you have lot of power you have to get the butt end out of the mud .I've got  a 1951 Ferguson tractor with a three point hitch that would
\ usually do it .If not it just so happens I also have a 1954 Oliver OC-6 bull dozer that can handle that task .Since it's came up I have a hickory with a wind blown top making it a widow maker about 60 feet up hung in another 100 foot hickory .No hurry eventually the wind and father time will get it down .The only way I could get -er-done would be hanging on to big helium filled balloon .Not going to happen .

[SwampDonkey]

I was cutting some hardwood for logs one time. I was doing just fine and getting the trees down to the ground on every tree. Well my father comes along and says let me cut that birch. Of course it lodges, and not a completed cut.  Well we left it to fall in the wind and time. Came back to get it a few days later, of course being an incomplete cut, it split the but log as it fell. Some times old farts just gotta be someplace else. It's not like dad hadn't cut 3000 cords of wood before, but that one tree took him off guard.     His solution to the mistakes is firewood. ;)

[cutterboy]

HEY HEY HEY be careful what you say about old farts! Remember, we all have split butts.