FATWOOD, locating and harvesting link.

Robbie, God bless you and your wife on her battle and triumph over her cancer, that is awesome! Great pictures and info, may have to check some of those old pine stumps out next time I'm up in the woods.......thanks for sharing!

Glad to hear about your wife. May she stay well. thanks for the info.

Robbie...thanks for posting, and congratulations on the diagnosis on your wife.

Nice photos too. I've always assumed that the actual fatwood stump is merely the heartwood of a much larger tree that weathered away. They are typically longleaf pine stumps. If you've never done any reading about the ancient and extensive longleaf pine forests of the S.E. U.S., it really is an amazing story. It is the old, old story too.....huge resource... unbridled extraction... greedy exploitation... and the resource disappears as a result. Not that longleaf is extinct. Of course, it isn't, but the ancient stands that carpeted the South from Va. to Texas are gone. They were cut off the stump, but also damaged in turpentine havesting operations of immense scope for "naval stores." These trees grew in dense forests that burned regularly. Longleaf needs fire to propagate. The natives burned them regularly, and lightning-set fires were also typical. The result was a park like forest with long sight lines through the trees. A man on horse could ride through them with little difficulty. The timber grew straight, wide and dense. The shorthand description most folks use for it is "heart" pine. I've seen heart pine sills that were placed directly on the dirt underneath 150 y.o. cabins, with no rot or insect damage whatsoever. Others refer to it as "pumpkin" pine, due to the golden color you've described. There is a large salvage market in this material...beams taken from old gins and warehouses. Literally, longleaf pine (billions of board feet of it) was shipped around the globe. It was the "go to" structural material for large buildings for a long, long time. I've made some furniture out of it, and the grain and color is superb. Some of the longleaf logs were even too dense to float, and sank to the bottoms of the rivers while they were floating to the mill. There are there to this day, and can be brought up and sawn into boards with no noticeable difference in appearance or quality.

And yes, it burns like a sum' a beetch.

Congratulations Robbie! Let's celebrate! We still fight the battle here but it is looking good right now.

I have 10 pine stumps in my yard trees cut down 2 years ago...how old do the stumps need to be

Why do the stumps need to be so old? I've got one I had dug up about three years ago and pushed into the bush. Is it just a matter of perhaps removing the outer few inches to expose the fatwood?

Robbie said:

I think it has something to do with the pine sap being so old it almost hardens. You could try it but I bet it would be like regular pine sap from pine knots and pine cones. It burns good too but it is very sticky. This wood is hard as a rock, very heavy and is almost greasy but not so that it gets on your hands. I read somewhere it said the fatwood almost became fossilized.

I do know it will not rot or decay. Regular pine will rot and decay even with resin in it.

I know it's very different than regular pine resin.

This might help understand a bit,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fatwood

Robbie

Click to expand...

I think it concentrates as well as moisture drying out. The resin is still a bit liquid, as when i split old stumps they are damp with resin and dry over time, also some old tree or stumps will ooze resin when cut with a saw. This is not water, the moist splits will burn like wood soaked in deisel fuel.

fatwood only comes from the pine family?.......