Texas Seasoning

[DuaeGuttae]

Our family moved to South Central Texas a couple of years ago. Our house is surrounded by lots of beautiful (and lots of scraggly) live oak trees and countless Texas Cedars (Ashe Junipers). The latter are considered a native invasive in the area. We’ve been slowly clearing and pruning for the health of the land and accumulating some firewood in the process.

Most of the wood we have is pretty small, so we haven’t done a lot of splitting. Some of the wood is stacked in racks in a covered barn with good air flow. Other wood is still outside where it can get wet, but it also gets lots of Texas sun.

Today while my husband and I were doing some work on a garden fence, he needed to cut a cedar stump lower. He had felled the live cedar in March but left the stump about four feet high. He cut off two rounds today, and we decided to split one to see what the moisture was inside. 16 - 18 percent on the fresh split face (and no, the wood was not cold down here in Texas today).

“Nice,” we said to ourselves, “but it’s cedar. Let’s try that unsplit oak branch over there.” We had cut it from a tree and to stove length in the spring. It was only about five inches around but was a bear to split today. There was a curve with a knot, so we didn’t get the whole thing in half. We did get off a good chunk before the knot, enough to expose some fresh interior wood. We tested with the meter: 18 percent. I was surprised but quite pleased. Now I won’t worry quite so much about all those branch pieces that are too small and twisty to split. Since that’s a huge portion of our wood, it’s nice to know it’s seasoning just fine in our hot, dry climate.

 

[woodhtr]

Yes but in south Texas you have to run the A/C while you burn the wood in the fireplace...

 

[Grizzerbear]

Yes but in south Texas you have to run the A/C while you burn the wood in the fireplace...

I've worked in south texas many a time and froze my arse off lol.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Yes but in south Texas you have to run the A/C while you burn the wood in the fireplace...

I wish we had a fireplace that could produce heat like that. It would be nice to put some of our firewood to work on a day like today. It was below freezing for more than twelve hours, and once the sun did shine it only got up to 40 for a bit before it dropped back down. Tonight will be colder. (And, on the flip side, next week the forecast says we’ll be back to the 70’s.)

I am glad to be done with air conditioning season, though, for a few months. The heat is long and persistent down here.

 

[kborndale]

If it was 40 degrees you did not get an accurate reading from your moisture meter.

 

[DuaeGuttae]

If it was 40 degrees you did not get an accurate reading from your moisture meter.

I agree with that, but you must have missed the date of the original post and the note that the wood wasn’t cold. We’d been having some mild temperatures, and it was about 70 and sunny at the time. That’s one reason we tested the moisture that afternoon. Our cold front blew in just this past Monday with high winds, rain and ice, and plummeting temperatures. It’s not even out of the thirties today. It’s South Central Texas, though, so it won’t last long.

 

[kyguylal]

Wish our wood dried like that. Looking at a good three years for oak. Wind chill was 2 degrees this morning. We're considered mild for the New England states.down here in southern New Hampshire

 

[DuaeGuttae]

Wish our wood dried like that. Looking at a good three years for oak. Wind chill was 2 degrees this morning. We're considered mild for the New England states.down here in southern New Hampshire

But you don’t wish your wood was as small or twisty as what grows down here. Those are some live oak branches we needed to trim from above the driveway and back deck. The big one is about six inches. We definitely would have split that in Virginia (probably twice) to encourage drying, but seeing our results down here (and given the fact that we don’t even have a stove yet), we’ve got time to wait and see how it does. The other branches are too big and dense for the chipper shredder so they’ll be cut for wood, too, even though they’re pretty small.


This a what’s left of a huge pile of trimmings we did around power lines this spring when we were putting in a new garden space. Most of it is cedar. The thick piece up front is about eight inches in diameter, the rest a lot smaller. You can see why we don’t bother splitting it for the most part.