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First Firewood Guild Harvest!

First Firewood Guild Harvest!

Hey all! Hope you've been able to get outside in the good weather this week. I have some great stories this week, so let's get right to it:

Events on the Horizon

  • Friday, May 29th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
  • Saturday, May 30th, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.
  • Saturday, May 30, 2-4pm - Electronics Recycling Drop off at Montague Farmers Market. It's as easy as loading up your car with your old electronics and dropping them off. Recyclable Items: household batteries, light bulbs, printer cartridges, and MOST household/portable electronics. NO large appliances, air conditioners or CRT monitors/TVs. Montague Commoners will be hosting a tech-take-apart table where we harvest magnets from hard drives.
  • Tuesday, June 2nd, 5-7pm - Common Ground is hosting a talk by Lori Hayes, the election director of Muskegon County, about how local elections work and the measures in place to keep them safe.
  • Friday, June 5th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
  • Saturday, June 6th, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.
  • Saturday, June 6th, 11am-7pm - The Muskegon Pride Festival! Montague Commoners will be in booth 83, so come say hi!
  • Thursday, June 11th, 5:30-7pm - Join Chemours Environmental Impact Committee (CEIC) as they present their plans to Chemours (formerly DuPont) and EGLE on on June 11, 5:30 to 7pm at NBC Middle School in Montague.The more community members are there, the harder we can push for a real cleanup.
  • Friday, June 12th, 12-1pm - Dance for Democracy at the Weathervane! Bring your signs, visit with your neighbors, and dance the stress right out of your body.
  • Saturday, June 13th, 9am-2pm - Montague Artisan Market! Come join in on Montague Commoners projects, and check out all of the other local crafters selling their wares.

Firewood Harvest!

A fallen aspen tree hanging slightly off the ground with a bright orange log jack leaning against it

Wendy got in touch with us last week about some trees that had fallen near her house, so Nate and I decided to put our Firewood Guild hats on, and do a test run of what a Firewood Guild tree harvest might look like.

In this case, we had a fairly large aspen that had rotted out at the base and fallen over. From counting the rings, I think it was about 30 years old. The wood was still very fresh, but it didn't look like the tree had leafed out before it fell, so I'm guessing it fell a month or two ago. It was growing on the border between a seasonally soggy woodland and a patch that looks like it was rather brutally brush-hogged by the power company sometime in the last 1-2 years. Everything beyond the bottom ~2 feet of the tree was still beautifully healthy, so I've got a few theories so far for why the tree fell over:

    1. The local water table may have been rising too high for the roots of the tree to stay healthy. Root rot turned into heart rot, which started creeping up the tree.
      1. Aspens usually like a high water table, but everyone has their limits.
    2. The brush-hogging equipment may have damaged the roots of the tree in a way that allowed aggressive fungi species to find their way in.
      1. The tree itself was at least ten or twenty feet back from where they were working, but if they drove heavy equipment on soft ground they could easily cause that sort of root damage.
    3. When the brush-hogging happened, it left the tree with less support for its canopy, allowing it to be knocked over more easily.
      1. This could be a contributing factor no matter what caused the heart rot.
    4. A secret conspiracy of invisible elephants knocked it over for fun and then framed the fungi remarkably convincingly.
      1. This is almost certainly not what happened, but it's a stand-in for the fact that we never know everything about a situation, and there could always be important factors we don't know about.
Wiley using a chainsaw to cut a firewood-length log off the end of the tree trunk. In the background is a forest full of vernal pools.

However the tree came down, there was a lot of work to do to turn it into firewood. Our goal was to cut it all to ~16" lengths so that it could start drying for the sugarbush next spring.

Tools we brought:

  • An electric chainsaw
  • Some long-handled pruners
  • The wrong log-jack

Tools we wished we brought:

  • The good log-jack
  • A hatchet
  • A portable sawbuck
  • Mosquito repellent

Over the course of three or four hours, we were able cut up the entire tree. We had to improvise a lot to compensate for missing tools, but we learned a lot along the way. I'm going to try to put together a "tree harvest go-bucket" with all the tools we need so that next time it's easier to grab everything at once.

It took several trips to get it all back to the yard, but I'd say we got somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3rd of a cord of wood out of it. To make an extremely rough guess, I'd say we could get about a gallon to a gallon and a half of maple syrup boiled with this batch of wood, and make three or four bags of biochar along the way.

The next step is going to be splitting the rounds so that the wood can dry faster, and then splitting the cordwood down to kindling for biochar. If you want to be part of making that happen, sign up for the firewood guild.

We were also able to collect some birch logs and a beech sapling that were probably cut down when the power company was doing their clearing.

I'm always on the lookout for fallen birches, because the bark is incredible stuff. The raggedy scraps make fantastic tinder for starting fires, and when you can get a large enough piece off intact, it's a wonderfully useful crafting material.

A chop saw with a clamping square being used as a fence to allow repeatable cuts of consistent thickness. There is a beech pole sitting on the saw about to be turned into tokens.
Five wire mesh wastebaskets filled with slices of wood cut from the beech branches above.

The beech poles were wonderfully straight and easy to cut into tokens. We'll see how many of the larger diameter ones survive the drying process without splitting too badly. Once they've dried for a few weeks, I'll sand them flat and get them over to Rob for stamping.

This week in Nature

Long green clusters of developing seeds hang down from the outer branches of a birch tree

Speaking of birches, I've been doing my best to track the seed development of the birch in my yard this year. I've been a little worried about the lack of young birches around town, and I want to see if I can raise some seedlings (and protect them from the deer.) That starts with figuring out when the seeds ripen and what they need for germination. If you've got a birch in your yard, check to see if it's growing clusters of seeds like these. I don't know how long it's going to take them to ripen, but we can watch along together 😄

An apple branch with a cluster of flower stems. Some of the stems show fruit starting to develop while others don't

And while we're looking at trees in the yard, this is also a great time to take a look at any nearby apple trees. The flowers have died back almost completely, and it's particularly easy to spot which flowers got fertilized and are now setting fruit. If you watch them over the course of the summer, you'll get a full sense of the apple's development cycle, and be ready to harvest when the time comes.

Recommendation Corner

Norwegian Wood by Lars Mytting is a great guide to every step of the firewood preparation process. It's full of well-researched background information, and leaves you understanding not only what to do, but why you're doing it. Nate and I have listened to the audiobook several times now while we've been tackling big firewood projects.

This Week's Nails Drum

A large hand-drum painted with concentric rings of color. The inner rings are bland white and grey, but the closer you get to the outer rings, the brighter and more varied the colors get.

Didn't get a chance to paint my nails this week, so instead you get to see my latest work in progress. It's the latest in my Empty Center Drum series, and at 22" it's the biggest one yet. I'm trying some new complexity in this first background layer, and I'm pretty happy with it so far. Next I'll start adding the borders between the rings, and then start working on the little teardrop figures. The extra room on the bigger drum gives me more layers to play with, and I have some ideas that I'm looking forward to trying out.

Enjoy the good weather while it lasts! Don't forget to bring your old electronics to the the recycling event on Saturday. If I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next week.

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