Box Elder, your thoughts

[wdchuck]

Received a call from a landowner looking to clear the borders of his property. Sounds like a lot of box elder, what are your thoughts?.

I plan on using it for firewood in the wood furnace in the basement.

What personal observations does anyone have from burning it?

It will probably be split, stacked as it comes home, this for the 08-09 burning season, as day-wood, like the soft maple/elm I use now.

Thanks.

 

[Millman]

Box Elder Burning

I burned box elder 3 years ago when I first started cutting wood. We got it from a home owner that had that and black walnut. The box elder was better than the black walnut, but not as good as the maple and cherry I got off the hill. It is interesting to split too - the red in the grain is pretty cool. It will burn fast so have some other hard wood handy.

~Millman

 

[wdchuck]

When I did a search in AS box elder came up only a few times and associated with willow, I have some willow that is earmarked for kindling, hatchet and mallet style splitting.

Tomorrow's clearing sounds like a whole lot of trees, if I had to guess, maybe a hundred or so. The guy used to be a logger up nort back in the day so this should go well, maybe I'll pick up some pointers. One of many upsides is that he has a tractor, so getting the logs in a staging area should be easy. Most of this is property tree line, 40acre plot, long tree line.

At least there is no timeline on this, and my cost is only fuel, just wish I had a bigger trailer to use, mine has 4x8 panel on a small boat trailer, 800lb payload.

I'll let you guys know how it went tomorrow, once I'm done for the day.

 

[windthrown]

Box elder cutting and firewood

Box Elder Maple is pretty easy to fell and cut up. No real problems there. Watch for hollow trunks in the older trees though. I cut a large one here last year and we still have a half cord of it on the racks. My girlfriend wants me to fell 6 more here this spring. It is a medium hardwood and burns fine. No problems as firewood. Real problem with these trees are all the boxelder bugs that reside in them! They are everywhere around those trees here. They also get into the other maples here too (bigleaf, Japanese, and vine).

I do not quite understand the association with willows and box elder maple though. We have 6 or 7 species of willow here, and none of them are as dense as box elder maple.

 

[Rspike]

Box Elder is a light low BTU wood like pine.
Elm is a good wood and in the lower of the hard woods.

Box Elder :
Dry Weight per cord: 2797
BTUs per cord: 17.9
(millions)

Pine :
Dry Weight per cord: 2669
BTUs per cord: 17.1
(millions)

Hackberry:
Dry Weight per cord: 3247
BTUs per cord: 20.8
(millions)

Hickory:
Dry Weight per cord: 4327
BTUs per cord: 27.7
(millions)

Elm :
Dry Weight per cord: 3052
BTUs per cord: 20.2
(millions)

Hedge Apple :
Dry Weight per cord: 4822
BTUs per cord: 33.2
(millions)

 

[windthrown]

Box elder seems to be on edge between low and medium heating quality firewood. I guess it depends on the cutoff points for heating quality. Some list box elder as a medium quality firewood, like on this web site:

http://www.chimneysweeponline.com/howood.htm

Others list is as a low quality firewood, like this one at Perdue:

http://www.ces.purdue.edu/extmedia/FNR/FNR-79.html

Not unlike Doug fir which some list that as high, and others as medium. Pine species out here in the west are highly variable in heat quality. Some are low, some medium, and some are high (ie., lodgepole pine is low, and pinion pine is farily high).

IMHO, the breakdown on wood that I burn a lot of and have my firewood stacks give the following results:

Low: willow, cottonwood, grand fir (good for starting fires with).
Medium: red alder, box elder maple, Doug fir, bigleaf maple.
High: apple, madrone, black oak, white oak, black walnut.

 

[wdchuck]

Well, Sunday went well except I was a little off in my expectations.

The quantity of wood is probably around 3 cords overall.

The time involved will be much more than imagined.

The amount of sweat equity is not proportional to the amount of good wood.

This guy is getting the better bargain, free labor to clear out and trim unwanted trees, limbs, and cleanup all debris from cutting into two neat piles for burning later. The largest diameter B.E. is less than 12"dia., and all are very twiggy. The Homelite XL2 will get a workout to clean up the limbs before bucking.

The upside, much of the work is in a well kept, level pasture that I can drive into, almost like a Box Elder orchard. So what am I cryin' about? 6hours, 60mi/RT, and barely filled my van, trailer came home empty, about 1/2 cord for the trip, 2" and larger. Lotta work for one guy, I'll be glad when this is done.

 

[stumpguy]

Well, Sunday went well except I was a little off in my expectations.

The quantity of wood is probably around 3 cords overall.

The time involved will be much more than imagined.

The amount of sweat equity is not proportional to the amount of good wood.

This guy is getting the better bargain, free labor to clear out and trim unwanted trees, limbs, and cleanup all debris from cutting into two neat piles for burning later. The largest diameter B.E. is less than 12"dia., and all are very twiggy. The Homelite XL2 will get a workout to clean up the limbs before bucking.

The upside, much of the work is in a well kept, level pasture that I can drive into, almost like a Box Elder orchard. So what am I cryin' about? 6hours, 60mi/RT, and barely filled my van, trailer came home empty, about 1/2 cord for the trip, 2" and larger. Lotta work for one guy, I'll be glad when this is done.

sounds like you would have been much better off just buying a load of hardwood.

 

[Dr. Hackemoff]

Well, Sunday went well except I was a little off in my expectations.

The quantity of wood is probably around 3 cords overall.

The time involved will be much more than imagined.

The amount of sweat equity is not proportional to the amount of good wood.

This guy is getting the better bargain, free labor to clear out and trim unwanted trees, limbs, and cleanup all debris from cutting into two neat piles for burning later. The largest diameter B.E. is less than 12"dia., and all are very twiggy. The Homelite XL2 will get a workout to clean up the limbs before bucking.

The upside, much of the work is in a well kept, level pasture that I can drive into, almost like a Box Elder orchard. So what am I cryin' about? 6hours, 60mi/RT, and barely filled my van, trailer came home empty, about 1/2 cord for the trip, 2" and larger. Lotta work for one guy, I'll be glad when this is done.

I hear you. I took a job clearing two big ash trees (ash - hooray!) that blew down at my dentist's house - on a lake right on shore. I show up, and fortunately, they had fallen on land, not in the water. But, the constant source of water to the root system had rendered the first 15 feet or so or normally prime trunk wood to mush. After four hours I was covered in mush chips and had a whopping 1/4 cord of wood on my trailer. Hooray indeed.

The story doesn't end there however. Shortly thereafter the landowner showed me another one of his properties, which had many old ash and elm trees ripe for the taking, which I am still in the process of removing. Just drive up and cut.

So I guess my moral of the story is that no good deed ever goes unpunished, or something like that.

 

[PA. Woodsman]

There's TONS of Box Elder here in Pennsylvania, but most people don't use it except maybe for kindling or unless they can't get anything better. It has a neat reddish-colored 'butterfly" pattern inside the wood when you cut it. It's fooled me on several occasions-it somewhat looks like Maple (sometimes Ash) until you cut it and then realize "oh, this is Box Elder". Sounds like you did a lot of work for a little wood-but whom of us hasn't been there, eh?

 

[Forest Steward]

I do not quite understand the association with willows and box elder maple though. We have 6 or 7 species of willow here, and none of them are as dense as box elder maple.

Well, I really don't think there is any. The only real similarities between the two is where they occur naturally rather than the wood characteristics. They both like the high moisture soils, so I think that might make people want to group them together. Just my guess though.

 

[ciscoguy01]

Be

Well, I really don't think there is any. The only real similarities between the two is where they occur naturally rather than the wood characteristics. They both like the high moisture soils, so I think that might make people want to group them together. Just my guess though.

Do we have Box Elder here in the dacks??? Wasn't sure if you'd know.

 

[Forest Steward]

Well, It's distribution goes as far North as Newfoundland, but again, it's a species that thrives on flood plains. So you probably won't see it much in the hills, but there's no reason they couldn't pop up here and there in the valleys. Plus, people have a tendency to put trees in funny places. It's fairly commonly planted in yards. Once this happens it's easy for them to spread b/c they reproduce pretty prolifically. So I wouldn't be surprised if you came across some.

 

[windthrown]

Box Ender Maple and Willows...

Well, I really don't think there is any. The only real similarities between the two is where they occur naturally rather than the wood characteristics. They both like the high moisture soils, so I think that might make people want to group them together. Just my guess though.

Well, my tree book says that box elder maple is not a natural native along the Pacific Coast (left coast) so I do not know its natural habitat. It grows well here though, and was obviously planted on this property in a pasture area around what was a trailer home once. 7 or 8 of them in all, most are 30-40 ft tall. For some reason thay have not propogated themselves here from what I can see, and we have mature ones that have many hellicopter seeds each year. I presume that the squerrels eat all the seeds or the sheep eat all the seedlings or both. Sheep ~love~ box elder leaves! A gourmet treat for them.

It burns pretty well, and has about the same fuel value as alder. OK, it is not oak, but still... it'll burn. Amusing some of the wood types that people on the AS forum turn their noses up at. We heat 100% with wood here, and I am more than happy to burn whatever we can cut. :biggrinbounce2:

 

[Forest Steward]

Well, my tree book says that box elder maple is not a natural native along the Pacific Coast (left coast) so I do not know its natural habitat. It grows well here though, and was obviously planted on this property in a pasture area around what was a trailer home once. 7 or 8 of them in all, most are 30-40 ft tall.

Yea, it's defiantely an eastern species, but from what I hear it's been planted all over the place.

 

[ciscoguy01]

Ya know

All in all, some wood is better than others. If we got everything we preferred we wouldn't be choosy at all. I myself prefer Beech. It's better than oak on the btu charts, but everyone tends to lean towards Oak instead, not sure why... I myself, I try not to waste anything. I HATE POPPLE!!! But, on the same hand, I have a ton of it on my 3 acres at my house. It gets huge, falls over and takes a long time to dry and stinks sometimes when you burn it. However, it's a great wood for a nice hot quick fire, and if it means me burning a gallon of fuel oil and feeding towel heads or burning popple, I'll take the popple for sure. Box elder isn't great, it's a soft maple really. It's not the greatest on earth, but it will keep you warm. One thing to do with softwood is keep your block size a bit bigger than you have to with hardwoods. The smaller the blocks, the quicker it goes up the chimney, but it also takes a bit longer to dry, but hey, for free? You cant' beat that price. Up here in the daks, we had a very bad ice storm back in 97. I was living in NC at the time and didn't see what it did. When I moved back here 4 yrs ago, I couldn't believe the damage it did. My cousin's 500 acre woodlot lost around $100,000 in timber easy. Where I cut now is a mixture of public/private land. Mostly private now as I just found out you can't transport wood off state land. Point of all this is, pretty much my last 20 or so face cords of firewood have been a mix of everything that I've found dead or down in this area. I'm sure there's hundreds of cords of dead/down stuff from the ice storm. I can't see letting this go to waste when it could be used. It's either burn it and get what heat you can out of it, and sometimes that means an extra 2 or 3 trips to the woodstove to restock but hell I'm not lazy, or let it rot in the woods. I wish everyone thought of it like this. Cutting live trees is necessary, but I hope everyone was instilled with the same ideas of using what you have or can get. I'm no tree hugger, but if I can cut a live tree that will get bigger for another year for me to cut or just cut up about 5 dead or down logs, I'll cut the down ones. That's just me. I hate wasting anything.

 

[NORTHERN NYer]

Ice Storm

Not to be Nit Picky but the Icestorm was in 1998. We were with out power for 10 days.

 

[tawilson]

21 days here. Don't forget about the one in '93. And the microburst, I forget when that was.

 

[svk]

Was at my friend's house today in Minneapolis and he had box elder growing all over. I've only split it once before, helped a different guy who had some in his yard and id'ed it from the purple stains then double checked the bark.

He's got two growing up along his back drive, one is about 6" and the other 10" dbh with all of their limbs over his driveway because they are competing with a big oak. His other neighbor has close to a dozen along the property line growing along the fence line but all of the trees are leaning into my friend's yard to get sunlight. And they are even trying to take over his raspberry patch. These things are almost worse than aspen root suckers!

I told him to take em all down before they become a bigger problem. His yard has several beautiful oaks and sugar maples with a cherry tree near the house so no need to let that garbage grow.

 

[svk]

Edit: didn't even realize I ressurected a 9 year old thread. Gypo Logger would be proud.