Harvested Some Fatwood

[woodyz]

Since it is getting cooler around here and we will be lighting up the fireplace sometime soon, I decided I would harvest some fatwood today. This stump is one we cut about this time last year. We left it 6’ tall because we wanted to use it as a hammock tree.
When we drug the trunk off it scraped a wound in the stump so I thought I would see if I could get some fatwood from it. Sure enough as the year went by I formed a vein and scabbed it over.
The problem was I didn’t want to cut the stump down to get it out, it still makes a good hammock location. So I used an axe, a hand saw, a hammer and a wood chisel to get out what I could. I got most of it out today.
The fatwood was shaped like a wedge about 6” wide at the outside and about a foot long and it tapered in to a point about 5” deep.
Here is a before and after picture and a picture of the harvest. I got the better part of a five gallon bucket about 10# worth.
It is so soaked in turpentine it got on my tools and gloves. Good stuff. Tomorrow I will shape it into 2’ chunks, put some in my fire kits and put the rest in the freezer so the turpentine doesn’t evaporate out of it. When we are ready for a fire, just let it thaw a few minutes and we are good to go.

[woodyz]

We were marking some trees to drop this weekend and found something very weird. It appears we have a hard wood that has a long leaf pine growing around it. The hard wood is the core of the pine. I will take some pictures tomorrow.

Then when we drop it the cross sections will prove very interesting indeed. It has several places where the hardwood has come to surface and created fatwood.

[woodyz]

Here are the pictures, I chipped some of the center out and it is oak, inside the pine.



A closeup of the center of the tree.

[angelhelp]

I can hear the pine Borg now... "You will be absorbed. Resistance is futile."

In all seriousness, do you know what the hardwood part of this is/was? I've never known a tree to do this, and neither has MirkwoodWanderer.

[woodyz]

The bark I can see and the piece I broke out say it is oak. We had planned on cutting this tree and some others this weekend but my son has the opportunity for overtime so we will be doing it later. Once we drop the tree we are going to cut it into slices so we can get an idea of what and maybe how it happened.

This tree is very tall not stunted at all, but it has many places where it appears the oak broke out, even one place where it looks like a small oak branch grew.

I have never heard of it either. I have cut hedge and found where several trees grew together and in some case one became the core. Always the core tree was dead and rotted inside, but I have never seen a tree wrapped inside a different tree type.

Knowing how trees grow in side out and create rings doesn't seem possible for them to grow around something.

I have seen where trees grow over a board or something attached to the outside so this may be the same. I think when we cut into it we will find two pines and an oak. The two pines so close together they merged and the oak kill off but pushed upward as the pines grew. I don't think the oak lived at all inside the pine, I think it was killed and push along and up. I guess we will see. Once we cut it I may have to take a section to the forestry people and let them explain it.

[angelhelp]

MirkwoodWanderer and I are eagerly awaiting your report! I had a birdfeeder hook that I forgot one year. By the next year, the mulberry branch had grown so much around the hook that I couldn't remove it. Not until last October's storm did the mulberry lose that hook.

[sladenorthernil]

We have a few naturally spliced trees out at the family orchards in Malta Illinois. Only one I think that has completely encased the other like that though. And it only covers the other tree for about 3 or 4 feet. That's a truly awesome tree you got there.

[alex]

I was out at the farm last week and noticed a pine that I hunted from as a youth has since died and fallen....the thing is that about 12' of the pine is still standing and is nothing but fat wood. The top that fell from that 12' section is also fat wood....we're talking about over 25' of fat wood that's 8-10 inches in diam. at it's largest section. Everywhere there was a limb there is a "beard" of fat wood sprawling out of the main section...as it is right now...I am going to let it lay and continue to use the fat wood pile we accumulated 25+ years ago....

[woodyz]

Great find. All of our pine trees, which make up 90% of our trees are long leaf pines. I am glad we still have them where we live, so many were eliminated 90% in the last decade. Yes we cut some down, but always as a thinning when growth of the other trees is in danger. While I understand the arguments for clear cutting, I will never allow it on any of my property as long as I am alive. I have seen so many old growth forest, some trees more than 100 years old, clear cut here and lob lolly pines replanted in neat little rows like tombstones. I hate it.

[offtrail]

Nov 2, 2012 19:53:06 GMT -7 woodyz said:

Great find. All of our pine trees, which make up 90% of our trees are long leaf pines. I am glad we still have them where we live, so many were eliminated 90% in the last decade. Yes we cut some down, but always as a thinning when growth of the other trees is in danger. While I understand the arguments for clear cutting, I will never allow it on any of my property as long as I am alive. I have seen so many old growth forest, some trees more than 100 years old, clear cut here and lob lolly pines replanted in neat little rows like tombstones. I hate it.

I hear you woodyz there's a lot of difference between natural and neatly planted evenly spaced trees. What makes nature beautiful is it's unevenness.