Eastern Red Cedar? Worth cutting up for firewood?

Ill bet it smells wonderful in there. Take a couple whiffs for me!

 

Yes it does. I still have to get the trim up and have some old barn tin I got from helping my boss tear down a barn on his place to put on the ceiling.

 

Ive never scrounged the arborvitae. Popular landscape shrub. Yup ERC is a juniper. Does get confusing

 

My understanding is members of the Juniper family including those called cedar have pointy leaves/needles. True cedar has no pointy leaves/needles. A juniper can have a mix of pointy and rounded leaves/needles while a true cedar has no pointy leaves/needles. Arborvitae is a true cedar also called northern white cedar.

 

Looks like ERC bark and that size would have the red heartwood. Either way ill bet it made great kindling when you split it up. Next time i go to the dump and there is some cedar logs im gonna grab some. One time there was a whole bunch of ERC logs bucked to stove length. It had just rained, they were wet. I could smell them! FHC air freshener!

 

Yeah I CSS all I had at normal split sizes, and boy did that stuff take off in the stove. It's got to make great kindling. At this point I'm down to a few token splits left. I'll take all I can get of the stuff now. There's a few dead ones close to my work that are looking like prime candidates.

 

I think any wood near your work is a prime candidate!

 

Locally, we have always just called them Cedar trees, which was also the standard Christmas Tree if you cut one yourself, in this part of the world. I didn't know it was actually classified as a Juniper. It definitely has pointy needles and also sometimes tiny little blue berries, and the middle is red. They are a nuisance tree here, very prolific and will take over an old field or farm if left alone long enough. They are hard to cut down sometimes, because of the many prickly branches which extend all of the way to the ground unless it a pretty old and larger tree. This is where a saw with a long bar or a pole saw comes in handy to wade into the center where you can finally get to the trunk.
It takes a fairly long time for one to get big enough to make decent lumber, but they do make fairly good fence posts. I quite cutting them for Christmas trees, many years ago, because they dry out fast, even when set in a bucket of water, and become quite flammable, and have caused many a house fire.

I cut and split about a face cord or maybe half a cord today. I will use it for a hot and fast fire, but I doubt I will fill my stove completely up with it.

 

Yes. Dry it and burn it. I use it for kindling. Drys fast and burns good to get my oak and hickory started.