What are you cutting 2024? - pics welcome

[David B]

I like the beach, 2hrs west 😁

Some big Euc and a little Mesquite...well, medium sized for Mesquite. 


https://youtu.be/V09aa_raQyE?si=_yhXNxfsZOF93ei2

[SwampDonkey]

We don't have black birch either, but we have grey birch. But it isn't really classed as a tree. Gets no bigger than pin cherry. I have seen pin cherry sawed into lumber before. Doesn't look much different than black cherry. I have had some as big as 16" dbh. Grey birch maybe 8-9" and it's done growing. I call it oversized alder. Any wet snow or ice will bring it crashing down. And it is fairly heavy wood for junk.

[cutterboy]

I have cut and burned gray birch. It burns like white birch and has about the same density. 5-6 inches in diameter is about as big as it gets here. I only cut it if it is in the way or if I am clearing an area or cutting along the edge of a field.

[GRANITEstateMP]

I ran 2 black birch logs through the processor today. I split them small cause they smell so dang good!

[Mooseherder]

I've been using large chunks of white birch without the bark for grilling and smoking alongside charcoal this year with great flavor results.  I line the charcoal perimeter with the chunks to get the flame and smoke going and move them off after the cook to reuse on the next cook.  It's similar to a sweet cherry smoke only better because I don't have to buy it.  Also saves on charcoal use.

[SwampDonkey]

Making white birch bark tar oil.

https://otzispouch.ca/how-to-make-birch-tar-oil

[thecfarm]

Another member cutting black birch

[GRANITEstateMP]

The black birch burns pretty good too... but man it smells GREAT!  I dig get a sawdust chip in the mouth when processing, it might smell great but still tastes like wood.

[newoodguy78]

That's for sure Granite it might smell like Teaberry gum but definitely doesn't chew the same 

[Resonator]

I've never tried it, but they make something similar to root beer called "birch beer" from birch bark (made in Pennsylvania and eastern states). Birch has a natural wintergreen - minty flavor to it, very noticeable if you run fresh cut branches through a chipper.
They also make syrup by boiling down birch sap. But it is around 100:1 ratio to make it, as opposed to 40:1 ratio for maple syrup.

[Old Greenhorn]

Been a long time but I used to make a birch tea as a treat. Boil up the fine twigs and tips. It comes out pretty tart but with some sugar, you got a tasty treat. Easy to make on the fly in a hunting camp.

[doc henderson]

I like that, Tom.  "If you add enough sugar, you could almost drink it"!  In scouts when I was still a kid, I was hanging with a mentor at a camporee in the fall by a fire, drinking cowboy coffee with the grounds dumped in.  cold water was added to sink them, and then care was used to pour each cup.  some younger guys came around and started asking about the coffee and somehow, they were led to believe that it was made from the leaves on the ground.  Leaves do smell like a nice cup of tea in the fall.  well, these boys prob. had some upset moms as they filled their backpacks full of leaves off the ground to show their moms how to make cowboy coffee from leaves off the ground.  who knows, with enough sugar it might have been OK to drink. 

[SwampDonkey]

In some areas around here that had mostly big white birch and not a lot of maple they did tap the white birch for syrup. There is a place name here called Birch Ridge. It doesn't even run as well as maple sap, much shorter window to the season. Some trees will hardly run at all. It was common here to tap butternut for syrup, we never did it, we had lots of sugar maples. 

There was a massive die off of old growth white birch during WWII. My grandfather said it wasn't safe to hunt in the woods with any breeze in the woods. Not many places grow big huge white birch. I worked on the west coast and never saw one bigger than 10". I've seen several here over 3 feet across at DBH. That would mostly be on public land, or hard to get to areas on private. The largest white birch recorded currently in "The Great Trees of NB" is 32" at dbh. I've seen bigger.

[fluidpowerpro]

I've got a fair amount of white birch on my land. An 18" tree would be big. It seems they die before they get any bigger.

[doc henderson]

I have not had time for a few years but had a good experience tapping walnut trees for sap.  could use the sugar to make other things more tolerable to drink.

I got a book on sugaring and looked up walnut syrup and in the half a page, it mentioned a study done by a prof. at KSU.  I looked him up and sent an email.  I got a call from his wife a few weeks later that he had passed a few years back.  She was grateful to have someone still interested in his work.  We had a nice chat.

[SwampDonkey]

I've read about the white birch die off in many sources. I have an old forestry textbook from the late 40's that mentions it also. It's here someplace in the loot.

[thecfarm]

I use to have some white birch here. 
These were old and about 2 feet across.
My father and me cut them for logs. They had a lot of red rot to them, but it was solid.
These trees would have a lot of black in the bark. I suppose due to being 80-100 years old. 
I don't have many white birch now. For some reason there are not many growing now.

[SwampDonkey]

My white birch are scattered and sparce, except one run that was mainly cedar. When that was cut it came back to a lot of white birch. There had to be some big old birch seed trees in that cedar ground to come back like that. I have a big old yellow birch, about 30" across, the yellow is all gone in the but log, all turned into some big plates of bark. That thing puts out a billion seeds each year, loaded in catkins. It's crown is all open to the sky. But I don't have many of that kind either, even more sparse. It to is on cedar ground as there are thousands of fence post (and lots smaller) sized cedar around it. A lot of huge aspen grew in there to, as big as 45".

[thecfarm]

Good size aspen!!! 
The white birch that I had was scatted all over the woods too.
I do have one small area of yellow birch, maybe 500 feet across with one big one.

[g_man]

We have a lot of birch, white, grey, and yellow. Never tried make syrup though. As a kid we used to chew on yellow birch twigs. This dying white is/was the biggest by far at 32". The big ones remaining are only 16" or less. 



gg

[cutterboy]

50 years ago one large area of my woods was all white birch, small trees 6-12 inches in diameter. It was thick with them, a beautiful sight, a white forest. Over the years the pine and maple and oaks overtook them and most of them died out. A few are left but not very big. I make lumber from them but a 14 inch log is about as big as it gets. Most logs range from 8-12".

Tom, my boy scouts made that tea also.

[Old Greenhorn]

I like that, Tom.  "If you add enough sugar, you could almost drink it"!  

Now Doc, you are twisting my words a bit.  I said "But with some sugar, you get a tasty treat.." I did, and likely still do like Birch, and sassafras teas but it had been a while. I did most of my experimenting back in the early 70's when Euel Gibbons was a big deal then and my Dad was on the staff of a wilderness survival course. We would devote a good part of our weekends at home testing out new stuff and perfecting skills like fire building (without a store bought spark stick). We had dozens or sets of bows and spindles we made with various woods to work out which type of wood was best for each part of the system. So yeah, testing various sort of plants and things was part of that process.
 I consumed a lot of stuff that would not taste very good no matter how much sugar you put in it. Sumac tea, for instance is SO tart you think you are going to suck your ears inside your head from puckering. That took a LOT of sugar to be palatable. But we had a lot of sumac in our region, so it was on the menu. Peppermint tea was my favorite, but very hard to find. We came across about 1/2 acre of it on the Appalachian Trail one time and collected a trash bag full, brought it home and hung it to dry through the winter. It lasted us a couple of years.

[SwampDonkey]

They always said sumac juice was like lemonade. I never tried it. We never had any around home, but the field/pasture behind grandfather's was full of it, close to the river.

[Mooseherder]

A whack of White Birch cut into firewood a couple of years ago.  I've got a smaller pile ready to cut and split next year.

[doc henderson]

our winters are mild enough that the soft maples get leaf buds in Jan. and that imparts a bitter taste (like prednisone).  same with one attempt at sycamore syrup.  very bitter.  I may try earlier and see.  but the leaf buds tell you not to make syrup.