Rekiwi's Blog

We finally chopped down the dead cherry tree in our back yard.

When we moved to the house in '99, the tree produced some fine fruit. I'm crazy for just about anything edible and cherry.

The next couple of seasons, the birds clued in and got most of the fruit before we could.

Then the tree sickened, weeping a huge wad of dying tree snot from its trunk.

Most literature recommends cutting off the diseased branch, which is not really an option when the trunk is involved.

So the poor thing died.

I thought of the cherry lumber that I might harvest. It was a small tree, so the yield would only be a couple of board feet of narrow wood.

Harvesting my own low-value lumber didn't motivate me enough, however.

The tree corpse stood in our yard for a year or two with the local birds happy to perch in its spindly dead branches.

Last night, my wife suggested that we get rid of the lich-tree. I had the time, the inclination, and a chainsaw.

The roots had rotted after so much time in the ground. We just pushed the trunk over.

As expected, we unearthed an impressive termite colony.

Despite the bug damage and soft rotted patches, the trunk still sang like solid lumber when I whacked it.

Some judicious chainsaw work and hatchet swinging revealed a lot of really nice wood. I would've preferred an adze or a drawknife, but my wife tells me I have enough tools.

Now I'm going to dry the wood out to a fungus-hostile less than 20% and see what I can do with the little log.

Maybe I'll make a plaque for our doorbell to replace the crumbling holesaw cutout of particle board that my father-in-law insisted he install so many years ago.

Maybe I'll make a door harp.

Who knows?