Gotta love the organic dump. I dumped this: And exchanged it for this: Wood gets dumped on one side of the yard and leaves and branches on another side. There is always something there that I can take home. Today I also grabbed a perfect height spruce round to give to my neighbor to use as a base for his tire splitting setup. I've never had the pleasure of splitting or burning white birch so I'm pretty excited to try it out. There were some ginormous rounds I'd have to split before even thinking about picking up......but that big old log there is pretty tempting to go back and have at it with a chainsaw. No idea what kind of wood it is but it is very straight. Maybe a maple.
Looks like a bunch of good wood is going to get buried. Get that bark less log! I want to know what it is and why someone would dump it.
Nice trade there. I have about the same amount of white birch that’s been CSS’d since May 2020. Unfortunately it’s at the very bottom of a stack of black birch right now. If this winter ends up being warm, it’ll sit for another year. I’m itching to try it out since it’s one species I haven’t burned indoors yet.
Properly dried, the stuff is practically match lightable. Just a smidge under cherry in BTU output- here at least.
LordOfTheFlies If you haven't split and stacked the paper birch and don't plan to for awhile, you may want to unzip the birch by running the tip of the chainsaw bar down the logs to open it up. You just have to go thru the bark.
I found black birch impossible to split by hand and had to resort to the hydro. It's not a lot but I will certainly be mindful of it when it burns. I might give it to my neighbor who absolutely loves white birch. I did. I usually break them up and give them away to people with firepits...but those people don't need any now and I don't really need a handful of cookies lying around. I don't like how they don't stack well indoors and also I need some material to dump as an excuse to go there......so I can trade up! Very faint kind of buttery smell almost....looks kind of like pine.....and I gave 2 to my new wood chopping neighbor and he split it easily..... What will that do for the wood? I try to split everything as soon as possible....I keep some rounds on the driveway but I'd rather have them css.
If paper birch isn't split or unzipped right away, the wood will start to rot. I have many paper birch trees that came down and the wood is rotted away but the park is still intact. Native Americans made birch bark canoes from the bark of paper birch trees because the bark is waterproof. If the logs are unzipped you have created a path for moisture to escape.
Gotcha! Thank you for the tip. I have some chainsawing to do tomorrow on the white oak anyways so I will unzip the white birch!
Nice! No friends or burners want your nuggets LOTF? Reminds me of my local compost center. I bring in brush and will sometimes take wood. Random species, usually dirty from being pushed around so i dont often take any. I would haunt it more if i had time and no other wood sources. He has offered to let me use a saw there. I now get charged for brush.
I’d hit the dump while you can. I probably scored a total of a few yrs burning at my local dump. The higher-up there then told me I couldn’t do that anymore (liability). I was bummed but then realized there a lot of wood to be had on the wacky world of FB and CL.
Yeah I will be going tomorrow. I just can't let stuff go to waste like that if I see some real nice wood there. I'm guessing it's a maple. Let's see. Heh heh.
I've noodled a few bl. birch rounds for bowl blanks. It's a beautiful wood. Haven't really burned much. Its a good hard wood.
IMO…black birch makes much better firewood than white. Even split I wouldn’t let white birch sit around for too long.
I probably should have saved a round for wood turning as I just got myself a Powermatic PM2014 lathe. I have plenty of juniper, black locust, and spruce set aside for my experiments there. I love how black birch smells like root beer. Black birch infintely more dense, way heavier, and impossible to split by hand but I've yet to burn it since I got it green last year. This year it may be ready by winter. Now that I've smelled it a little more white birch has a medicinal tinge to it but still a pungent, thick smell as well, kind of similar to what ash smells like. The grain of the wood also reminds me a lot of ash.
