Cassie wrote:Just a brief response Stephen our woodland is approximately 40 years old mainly Larch and a few Sycamore & Silver Birch, not been managed in all this time so there are plenty of dead trees both standing and lying on the ground, we have an abundance of insects and birds including Woodpeckers who nest in the dead trees, I also make habitat piles and would like to think myself as a responsible conservationist and hope I can find a happy balance between nature and using carbon neutral fuel from my under- managed woodland.
Well as I stressed it wasn't a moral judgement I was making, just a suggestion to be aware of a problem that can occur when seasoning firewood in
certain specific woodland situations.
As I mentioned I heat my house wholly with wood - and I part-season much of that wood within the woodland. If you're interested I do two things which might be of use to you depending on the size of your wood, public access/paranoid safety issues and your own approach to how you feel your woodland 'should' look (tideness etc.)
Ring Barking. Ring barking standing trees kills them on their feet. If done in winter (when the sap is down) then 18 months later the top third of soft woods, like larch, will typically be down to less than 25% Moisture content. At chest height the M.C. may still be considerably more than 30% M.C., but ring barking is very quick and puts you ahead - when you do come to fell the tree it will be easier to handle as it will already have lost a considerable amount of weight as it dried - before processing and stacking to finish off seasoning somewhere else. This technique is much more suited to soft woods than hard woods.
Sour felling. This involves felling the tree in the early summer when the leaves are open (not early spring you want the leaves to be mature). The tree is then left on the ground whole and intact. Transpiration continues to take place through both the leaves and later stomata on the young twigs - causing moisture to be pulled out of the stem of the tree. In hardwoods this effect of accelerated drying lasts for about eight weeks (I've read continental studies suggesting longer, but my own experience is that the effect is imperceptable after approximately eight weeks. In that time though a tree in a breezy location can have reduced its M.C. by up to 20% -depending on its size and the ratio of crown to trunk. This technique can also be used for softwoods where the effect lasts longer than eight weeks, but unfortunately I don't know any figures to offer you.
The other thing I do is to leave logs stacked in just under 10 foot lengths in the wood (the size of the trailer I use) but to split them down the middle before stacking. I use either a froe or three wedges depending on the diameter of the wood. With a much greater surface area exposed to the air the wood seasons about 170% faster (i.e 1.7 times as fast) as logs that length left whole. Again you have the advantage when you come to move the wood that it will be lighter, and only a chainsaw is needed to finish off processing to final size as it's already spit. Splitting logs of this length once with wedges at ninety degrees to the round is also quicker than splitting many cut logs.
Of course with the above methods it takes longer from start to fully seasoned wood, but the time that is needed after the wood has been cut/split to it's final size to season is much less - so you need a much smaller log store at home. The other advantage is that people don't steal ring barked standing, or felled whole trees or 10foot lengths quite as readily as they do finished logs left in woodland. Also when you're finishing the wood off it is much lighter.
I hope you find a technique that works well for you and your woodland. Always try and minimize the number of times you handle each piece of wood - the wear and tear on your body adds up over the years! Given what you say of your woods with a large proportion of larch I wouldn't worry too much about how much dead wood there is, there will be plenty soon enough
by Cassie » Fri Jul 06, 2012 7:13 pm 
