well fed pine

[onionman]

Tree service dropped this  off today about 24"dia 3/4" between rings
Would this be a well fed tree?

Seeing this was a welcome break from the log I was working on.. I had used 4 bands
1 broke 1 cut up 1 cut down and I hit a nail on the last cut with # 4. Dead center of the heart

[PineNut]

I have some pines that are putting on about one inch diameter a year. Will probably not be the best wood.

[rvrdivr]

onionman , Where are you? and what type of pine is that?
About four months ago I help a friend remove 4 long leaf pines from NE Florida. The biggest was about 20" diameter and it had 1/4 inch or more between growth rings. Compared to some of the old heart pine I've recently cut with 15 or so rings per inch, It seems odd that these pines are growing faster. It must be the climate? 

[onionman]

 It was a yard tree from between two houses in metro Atlanta. The space between the rings struck me as odd for a tree of this size.Must have had a perfect location.
Onion

[Tom]

rvrdvr,

The old trees had no sun.  Most grew up in an already-canopied forest.  Even though fire was used to clean out the understory, the pines would grow as thick as fleas on a dogs back until nature and man did some pruning.  Long Leaf is naturally a slow grower, but, they didn't have a lot of help or open ground back in the "good old days". 

Tight grain is pretty and wears good, but one of the most critical things to look for is the symmetry.  That log Onionman displays is a good one.  The rings are all the same distance apart.  The tree grew evenly.  There is some reaction wood, as if it grew next to some other trees, but it isn't enough to really worry too much about.

[Texas Ranger]

Good view, Tom, I like it when you can tell where a major limb was out in the sun, and how that changers over the years.

[getoverit]

I have several pine logs that need to be milled that have some of those kind of rings and would fit into what Tom is talking about. They are well over 24" in diameter. They have extremely tight rings in the heart of the tree, and then as you go outward there is suddenly an explosion of growth and the distance between rings is at least an inch apart.

The thing I guessed is that at one tie they were in a forest, then at some point about 20 to 30 years ago they got liberated where they got plenty of sunshine and nutrients.

[DanG]

I like to do my learning from direct observation, whenever possible.  I got a  bit of a late start in the wood business, but I've been able to learn a few things by just watching my trees in the 12½ years I've had this place.  I've been watching some pines that were saplings when I moved here.  They're in some heavily shaded woods with large trees all around them.  Many of them are only 4" dbh, but have about 40-50 feet of clear trunk before the first branches.  Now, about 7 years ago, my tractor was broke down and I didn't get to mow the pasture for a while.  The same old Mama tree that spawned those trees, cast a bunch of seeds out into the field and I got a stand of widely scattered pines, some of which I decided to keep.  These trees are now about 8" dbh, but the limbs go almost to the ground, and the trees are only about 15' tall.  Same genetics, same soil, just different growing conditions made a huge difference in the way the trees grew.  That is why they plant pines really thick, then thin them a couple of times over the years.  Grow them in a crowd to get the height and the self-pruning action, then thin them out to make them grow fat(slowly) and let their own crowns shade them so they don't grow new branches on the boles.  That seems to be the name of the game, from where I sit.

[Ianab]

Yup Dang, you pretty much have it covered. It's quite a science here, how to plant, prune and thin pine trees. You can add in one more step though, lift pruning. Go around the trees every couple of years and remove the lower branches, just with some big loppers or a hand saw. The lower branches are not the trees primary food source, and as you have noticed in a crowded forest they have died off anyway. Base the pruning on the dia of the trunk, so for instance you prune up the tree untill the trunk is 6" dia. This leaves plenty of 'greenery' above to keep the tree growing. Come back in a couple of years, and prune up to 6" dia again. Keep doing this till you get sick of it, or cant reach the branches.  Now you should have a butt log on the tree thats 12 or 16 ft long, and only has knots in the central 6". The knots grow over and the tree puts on clear timber for as many years as you leave it.

This is combined with the close planting, meaning the lower branches are suppressed and smaller, they then heal over faster after pruning. By removing them manually you are just speeding up nature, if you wait for them to die and fall off themselves it could take 10 years. On a 25 year rotation thats a lot of the tree spoiled by embedded dead branches.

Anyway if you can keep all the knots and defect in a 4 or 5" core, and the rest is clear wood out to 24 or 36 ", you have a pretty nice sawlog.

Even your open grown trees could be persuaded to produce at least one good sawlog, even if they end up looking like lollipops in the process  :D

Cheers

Ian

[rebocardo]

Well, the trees I cut in Atlanta basically run 1/4 per year for hardwood (when about 20+ years old) and up to 1/2" for pine. Never seen one with rings that big. It must have been an ideal location, a lot of sun, rich soil, and probably plenty of water run off from the houses. Who knows, maybe it was feeding from the sewer lines in front of the houses like the oak does that keeps clogging my pipes  >:(

[KGNC]

October a year ago I was in MS with a church group cleaning up fallen trees from Katrina. Behind this one house was a 30" dia. pine that had been up rooted. It breaks your heart to have to cut a log like that into 5' lengths for a loader to load in a dump truck. When I cut it off the stump the rings were 3/4-1" apart, very even all the way around.  I realized the reason for the growth when I looked under the root ball. The drain field for the house was basically a pipe that dumped into a pit full of oyster shells. And the tree was right on top of this.