7 maples for the price of 1

It's hard to turn down a load of straight, clean, 12" t0 20" diameter maple logs, even when you're 5 years ahead on firewood and the maple in question is silver maple.



At first glance, I thought this was a very strange tree. By the size of the logs, it would have been over 100 feet tall but only 20" diameter at the stump. Or maybe it was a 130-140' tall monster, and someone kept the big logs? Then I saw the real stump at the back of the pile.



Turns out it was a 7-in-1 silver maple. 7 trunks attached to one huge, impossible to split stump. I'll take 7 for the price of 1, when the pice is free and delivered to my house.

 

Nasty weather today, but I couldn't help bucking up a few logs. The cutting doesn't get any easier than straight, clean, mid-size soft maple. After sharpening the chain, it was hard to even keep the saw in the fat part of the torque curve since the wood provides so little resistance.

 

I’d take some SM to fill the should season supply. Nice wood get.

 

Absolutely. Silver maple is the perfect firewood for October, November, April, and May -- at least in my climate. With minimal effort I'll have a big pile of huge splits that will be dry in one year. Soft maple is a superstar in terms of btus for the amount of work that goes into processing it.

I would happily burn 50% soft maple and 50% oak/hickory each and every year.

 

Those are some sweet logs. Straighter is gooder in my book. Id grab that in a heartbeat myself.

Wishing I could score silver Maple more often. Common enough as a yard tree just don't score it often.

 

Around here they grow like weeds, get huge fast, and die young, either from disease or from snapping in half during storms. The only trees that I have ever seen snap in half at the trunk are silver maples. This ain't tornado alley. I'm talking about normal thunderstorm winds, and the silver maples just give up on life.

I'll see if I can find a photo for any disbelievers. It is hard to believe until you see it.

 

The reason it had 7 trunks is almost certainly because the original trunk snapped in half in a storm, and all of the sprouts that grew out of the stump turned onto trunks. The stump is 6 feet wide, so it could have been the second or third time it broke and regret. Weird trees.

 

Here is a silver maple in my woods that gave up on life during a thunderstorm last fall. Just a normal storm, nothing crazy. The trunk that broke was completely healthy. No rot from what I could tell. Bigger than it looks -- probably 30" diameter where it broke.





See that second trunk next to the broke one? It broke in half a few years earlier. I will never understand why people plant silver maple in their yards.

 

Planted in yards as its a fast grower. Very popular yard tree around here. Common to see large sized ones similar to your multi trunk score. Oddly I've never seen one "in the wild" either.

 

There are lots in the wild around here. They compete well in wet forest. The seedlings do ok in the shade, so they outcompete oaks and hickories when young. And once some canopy room (sunlight) opens up, they get huge in a hurry, even in the forest.

 

Today the straight-maple-log guys came back with more straight maple logs. Maybe red maple and hard (sugar) maple? The darker one looks more like sugar maple than silver maple to me, but I rarely see sugar maple so I'm not sure.

Whatever they are, they will burn just fine.

 

Other CT FHCers have told me of wild ones they've seen in the state. Red maple is the dominant tree here. 1 in 4 trees in CT are red maples.

 

I've never found one in the woods around here, only on the riverbanks where the soil is sandy and they get lots of sun. They're a floodplain tree. The CT river is lined with quite a few of them.

 

I think it was you and/or Joe that told me about that. I forget.

I know they love wet soil like the red maples do.

 

Part of my forest is designated as wetlands by the state of Michigan. I think that's an exaggeration since to be wetlands there is supposed to be standing water for at least part of the year. In the spring the ground is saturated and low spots do often have standing water (mosquito heaven), but it's very much forest and not at all swamp. In any event, that area is dominated by silver maple, red maple, and black maple. 80% of the trees in those couple of acres are maples. They can tolerate having their roots in standing water for at least a few weeks every year, unlike the oaks and hickories.

I don't think you have black maple in CT, right? It's supposedly a type of sugar maple, but the bark is totally different. It burns about like sugar maple. Good stuff, but it takes two years to season.

 

Here's what the black maple bark looks like around here. It looks more like box elder than sugar maple if you ask me, but the wood is basically the same as sugar maple, and nothing like box elder.

 

Ive heard of it, but cant say I've seen one or mis IDed it. Maybe Eric Wanderweg has?

 

Looking at that I would call it sugar maple. Bark is very similar.

 

I've heard of it but it's more of a midwestern tree as I understand it. IIRC some people consider it a subspecies of sugar maple. I wouldn't doubt there are some planted specimens in CT.

 

Besides the gray, flattish bark, the leaves are not as pointy as sugar maple. They sort of have 3 main points instead of 5 like sugar maple. And the leaves are always sort of droopy.



But here's the fun part: black maple and sugar maple naturally hybridize wherever both are present. So you end up with hard maples with a lot of variance in the bark and leaves, and it's hard to say if they are sugar maple or black maple. Until I learned about the natural hybridizing thing, I drove myself crazy trying to ID the ones around here.