Our “teaser pic” from last week showed a stump burning in process. Our property is blessed with a mini forest around it which while pretty to look at, often results in a continuous battle against mother nature. Storms and high winds frequently rip through our part of Vicksburg leaving limbs and sometimes entire trees in its wake. If you lost power from a tree in Vicksburg it probably was one of ours – only half kidding.
Since we bought our house in 2014 I have been trying to reclaim some of the woods to make a decent road to the back of the property. While I cleared much of the smaller stuff with a chainsaw many of the larger trees had to be taken down by 6-man crews. The vast majority of this became firewood, most of which I split and sold by the roadside. As our gravel delivery for the driveway is on indeterminate hold, I thought I would take this time to talk about one notable exception.
The largest tree on our property was a wild black cherry tree (Prunus serotina) which lined the path back to the barn. Our black cherry had unfortunately sustained major damage to its split trunk. Not wanting to see this magnificent tree go to waste I decided to mill it into lumber so it could be used for a variety of projects. I had the guys from Primal Woods bring out their portable saw mill to make a day of it. After some grueling hours in the sun with some back-breaking help from my family and friends, we had ourselves a nice collection of fresh planks! 🙂
Preparing for the milling project had one additional benefit. Using steel siding leftovers from the barn Remodel I rebuilt the roof on one of my outbuildings. This was refitted into an “air kiln” where the planks could naturally dry out before being worked (see picture at Top). I have many ideas of what to do with these planks but high on the list is some furniture for the brewery, namely a nice bar. It would tell an interesting story and holds special significance to us.
Here’s a picture taken shortly after the cherry was felled. It’s hard to tell from this picture but that log is about 20″ in diameter and nearly 50′ long. There were TWO such trunks and this is the larger of the two.
At the end we loaded all the planks into a open-air kiln to dry.
