Cut some beech today. Rounds were perfect size IMO for firewood. I haven’t burned a ton of beech in the past but i know it’s a winner. It will probably get 3-4 yrs of drying time before burning.
I had the opportunity to burn beech last year. I wish I had more of it. Howevet, i can't whine too much, with several cords of oak ready to burn.
After years of burning nothing but red oak, I get the pleasure of burning some beech for the first time this coming winter. Looking forward to it.
Great firewood. My favorite. Also great you can let it dry it for 3-4 years but it'll be ready after one year because it seasons very fast. I'd take beech over oak any day!
Nice score. Beech is definitely on my list of species I won't pass on. I just grabbed a few small logs of it yesterday and today actually. It does have kind of a funny smell when you process it, which I don't mind. Then again so do a lot of top shelf firewood varieties.
This was from the state forest. I had been driving by this wood bc it was on a pretty steep hill that seemed like it would be a pain. The good part was that, once I cut it up, I could just roll the rounds down toward the truck.
Beech is my primary firewood, since we have an abundance of it locally, and I scrounge all that I can get. I've heard some compare it to oak and that it should season for three years however in the last 11 years, I've always had good luck with seasoning beech for 12 months (or less). Sure more time is better but it seasons much faster than oak and is a good, dense firewood. It can go punky quick when it dies but is great when you find a fresh blowdown. The only downside with beech is there can be a lot, and I mean a LOT, of knots and twists so a lot of beech splits end up in the ugly pile. When I went out Tuesday morning after the storm, I only found one tree that had come down and almost passed it by. Ended up getting about a day's worth of beech firewood from it (can't pass up good beech and didn't want to go away empty handed). This was a great beech score from a blowdown earlier this year. The cuts are kind of ugly however the tree was on a tricky slope and those rounds were heavy. I was more worried about where the rounds would roll than making neat cuts. Some rolled right to the trailer and one went halfway to the road (yes, I checked for oncoming traffic before I made final cuts).
We had a forester come into the woods at our farm. He marked a bunch of Oak, Maple and Cherry to cull. He also marked a few Beech but said he would treat them all as a weed tree. His exact words were "I won't say the word eradicate,but...". Our goal is to grow desirable timber and apparently, Beech isn't in that class. He did caution about opening up too much canopy in one spot. Oh well, more firewood for me.
That is mainly because of so many limbs on beech plus so much beech will rot in the center and you don't know that until you start cutting. Also the grain is not often strait. It is not great for lumber but is for firewood.
