Does this strategy work well.. dropping trees in spring and then bucking/spitting 4 months later?

Be of the guys at work, bought a house with a wood burner of some sort that heats the whole house. He bought some from a processor who said they season it in log form- oh boy. They guarantee it to be under 20%. We all know better.

he has already built a wood shed and is filling it, so I give him pointers on season times, etc. he plans to get a meter soon. Can’t wait to learn about his guaranteed wood.

in short, your guy is misleading people or doesn’t know what he is saying.

 

Local climates play a big role in wood drying times. Where I live we usually get 4 months (June -september) of hot, low humidity weather with very little rain. Wood that is css drys very quickly and even stacked in rounds it still drys but not as fast. With green trees laying on the ground a long hot summer might lower the M/C a good bit. If they lay there and get rained and snowed on then no it's not gonna dry.

 

I’m going though this right now with a pile of cottonwood logs cut in November and December of 2019. I bucked up a bunch of rounds in March and April of 2020 and a few this winter (November and December maybe). Finally got a chance to get back to them on Saturday. The bark is falling off in big sheets, which is good because it has a lot of sand in it. But the rounds I just cut are WET and HEAVY! The rounds cut March of 2020 are much lighter.
I need to keep pressing on this because being cottonwood it won’t last much longer if I don’t get it CSSed

 

Dont get me started on these guys splitting seasoned logs right into the delivery trailer.

 

Iv cut alot of old logs and they always push moisture when split, the only thing I noticed is they might dry a little faster depending on how old they are but its always a few months atleast. I recently cut 8 yr old oak logs and they still needed a few months to burn.

 

I am not sure and that will be my experiment during the next few months. I want to build a wood shed with a greenhouse roof and greenhouse panels on the side. There would still be considerable ventilation. In essence, it would be a large solar kiln for firewood. I made a greenhouse last spring and it gets super super hot. If I can replicate that concept with a lot of airflow, I have a feeling it will do a spectacular job at drying wood.
Back to the question though- if seasoned wood is actually preferable because of the mold that has inoculated the wood and subsequently dried out, this kiln may not help very much.
I will keep the board updated as I work on this.

 

Not only on FB....we have members here who do the exact same thing.

 

Very little drying goes on when in tree form. Tree guys and bulk sellers do it that way for convenience and ease of storage.

 

dime a dozen around here! Ive heard the same from my new customers.

 

They do that up there too?

 

Sandhillbilly makes a good point- If a person has plenty of logs/trees; bucking them a year to left the bark fall off makes for much better wood to season. Coming across a killed ash has that bonus if you catch it at the stage of bark coming off, and not punky.

 

What's all this talk about "mold inoculation"? Never heard if it before...

 

I've wondered the same thing. I finished up CSS a bunch of live Ash trees spring of 2011 that I stacked directly into a well ventilated shed. Actually it is an old wooden corn crib used for air drying ears of corn back in the day. The wood in my opinion is quite dry, and looks just like the day it was CSS. I haven't tested the moisture yet as I just received my moisture tester in the mail the other day. The wood lights and burns like dry wood, but I still get quite a bit more creosote buildup in my chimney vs burning the seasoned 2+ year old Ash wood that is stacked outside. I am figuring it is because there is still some dry sap that has not been broken down either from rain (water) or sunlight (UV rays)? I've often wondered how much creosote comes from kiln drying wood vs seasoned wood?

 

Corn crib will still have less air flow then a pile stacked out in the breeze, and very little, if any sunlight on it either...so I bet that wood is not as dry as the others...although, Ash should be dry after 10 years in there!

 

If your goal was to grow fungus or mushrooms, the first thing you would start with would be a green log. Drill some holes in it and put in the spores. The fungus would grow through the log and eventually come out both sides. I have a feeling that this is what actually may be happening when we season a log vs. just drying it (or kiln drying it). I think the moisture may distribute more fluidly in a fungal body, compared to a wood cell body. So to define the goal- we want wood that is good to burn. How we achieve this faster could be- make the wood very dry in a solar kiln, or, make an ideal growing environment for fungus so that it dries the wood. Perhaps a fungal environment may even require people to water their wood piles if it means that the fungus would grow faster.
These are just questions right now. I am going to start with a solar kiln and run some tests on my stack. I just picked up some greenhouse panels today.