Cedar ?
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Use the straight stuff to make a nice batch of kindling.
Cedar is the quintessential campfire wood. Sounds good and smells great. I personally don't use cedar for heating unless absolutely necessary as it burns so quickly.
Cedar is the quintessential campfire wood. Sounds good and smells great. I personally don't use cedar for heating unless absolutely necessary as it burns so quickly.
mass_burner
Minister of Fire
Sappy and smells piney? I have cedar all over my property and I've yet to see any sap, and cedar smell is not piney.
firefighterjake
Minister of Fire
I don't see much sap from cedar . . . but occasionally I'll get a few fresh cut rounds that "leak" out a bit of sticky sap . . . no where near as sticky as say eastern white pine or balsam fir though.
Cedar will drip a small amount of sap out of the end grain and knots when green. Once dried it will not drip at all. That's why it is used for sauna benches and paneling (same goes for aspen and basswood).
Yeah, that is what I have realized. The tree was cut down the day I got it dropped off so it was very fresh and was dripping its sap, but has since dried out.
mass_burner
Minister of Fire
Boy, you must have a different species of cedar there. I just cut down a live cedar tree yesterday, no sign of sap anywhere. Do your examples have purple/red centers?
Lots of different types of "cedar". We only have white cedar but the wood can be as white as basswood or a deep chocolate brown in the heartwood. Sometimes a 12" tree has 1/2 inch of dark wood and other times it's 3/4 of the diameter. Very slow growing. I've counted about 10 years per inch of DBH. Yard trees seem to grow much faster than forest trees
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thuja_occidentalis
The three most common "cedars" in SE Massachusetts are a juniper that tends to grow in abandoned fields, marshes and regrowth areas as a "first growth" species, a cousin that grows very tall( most commonly called red cedar) and a cypress (Atlantic White Cedar) that grows in wet spots but the high deer population is fond of them and will chew them to the ground when they are young. It is a cypress that is a cousin to arborvitae. It also tends to be a "first growth" species and does not survive in understory conditions. They were also coveted for shingles and many of the old growth ones are gone in the area.
I've cut a juniper down in the early Spring that was a little bit sappy but not like a white pine can be sometimes.
I've cut a juniper down in the early Spring that was a little bit sappy but not like a white pine can be sometimes.
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Well 3 years later, I’ll answer my own question. Most of the cedar I split up into kindle and it made great fire starters. I also have been burning splits all this week in this cold April we have been having. After drying for 3 years it doesn’t pop nearly as much and it’s throwing some btu’s.
Ashful
Minister of Fire
I uncovered about 1/4 cord of cedar in one of the stacks I burned this year. I can see that I started splitting it all as kindling, but then got tired and just started splitting it as normal size splits. It makes a great fire starter, in any size, but goes too fast to use it for anything else.
Yes, red cedar can be pretty dense. I imagine it puts out more heat that pine. We always cut it into small pieces to use as kindling, but knotty pieces we'd leave large and use as firewood. lots and lots of red cedar in virginia.
