In the spring of last year I found some 19 year old white oak rounds strewn about the forest floor near my house. Big, beautiful rounds. After banging the dirt off them with a maul, I cut them to length and split it all up. At least 2 face cords in total. To my dismay, I discovered that the heartwood was 30%+ moisture content after a mere 19 years. These were 30-40" rounds, mind you, and they were laying in in the forest floor. Almost a year and a half later I have some 20-year old, sub-20% moisture content hard-as-a-rock white oak that is ready to burn this season -- unless I decide to hoard it for a few more decades. Just how rot resistant is white oak heartwood? Extremely, incredibly, kind of hard-to-believe rot resistant. Bark is long, long gone and sap wood has mostly rotted away. But the heartwood is almost flawless, and actually quite beautiful in a firewood hoarder sort of way. Who can beat 20 year white oak splits? I'm sure someone out there has split some 30 or 40 year old white oak. I'd love to hear about it and see it!
It might be too wet to burn this season. Put it back in the woods for another decade and you should be good., lol.
It is hard stuff isnt it? Ive read that colonists used white oak for roofing due to its rot resistance. I have some dead white oak skeletons in my woods and dont know why i havent cut them.
Trying to wrap my head around the idea of 19 year old log still that high in mc. Guess that moisture only likes to travel up\down w/ the grain.
Most woods, in my experiences, seem to season better if standing dead and barkless. Almost all the bigger dead blowdown stuff I've cut over on the farm in the past was soaking wet and in most cases, on the south end of being useable if laying there too long. And standng dead oak is even more susceptible to staying wet inside, namely the bigger stuff, because of its grain structure. It just holds water until it's split, seems to season much faster when it's opened up.
I think several factors come into play here: A: Its sitting on the forest floor, so it most likely never sees any real sunlight, and depending on the density of other trees and such, wind is also reduced B: Its sitting on the forest floor, so it soaks up a lot of moisture from the ground If these same rounds were in an open field up on an elevated surface, but were unsplit still, the results would be much different I feel. I know at one time I've stacked split wood of various species on pallets several rows deep, but in the woods and covered with a tarp on the sides and top and the wood never dried out. If anything it became more moisture laden. Ive also had loose piles of splits and the bottom wood touching the ground never dries out. I think the takeaway here is to get your wood split, in a sunny/windy area, and off the ground to season.
No wonder I couldn't burn some oak I came across some years back.It had been laying on the ground in rounds for three years.I split it stacked and covered it in the spring and it still wouldn't burn that winter.
