How quick to split

[Remmy122]

There's a guy on CL who is thinning out his property fairly close to home (as close as Im going to get in the "city"). He has listed birch, we call it river birch but Ive seen it called other things here.

Ive always seen here that birch needs to be split asap to let the moisture out (same reason it was good for hundreds of years to make canoes). How quickly is that though? I had a scrounge that some one brought me that was about 1/2 good to go and 1/2 punky but I have no idea as to how it had been cut down.

I don't want to bring a ton of wood home and pile it up in my stack of rounds that need to be split and have them sit till Jan. till I rent a splitter if they're going to be half gone by then.

Thanks for all the info over the past year, and to come!

 

[Backwoods Savage]

A month won't hurt with white birch. I like to get it split right away though.

 

[firefighterjake]

Like Dennis said . . . it will not go bad overnight or in a week . . . I've had some birch that I've cut in late Fall and left until Spring stacked in rounds . . . it was fine . . . no real seasoning had started . . . but it wasn't all punky.

 

[Battenkiller]

With cold weather coming on, that birch will be safe for quite a while. Wood fungus has a real hard time growing at temps below 45º F, and virtually halts below 35º.

 

[ISeeDeadBTUs]

Sometime after her last "O" and she falls asleep, but b4 she wakes up expecting b'fast ;-)

 

[Kenster]

Sometime after her last "O" and she falls asleep, but b4 she wakes up expecting b'fast ;-)

well...er... okay!

 

[Danno77]

Sometime after her last "O" and she falls asleep, but b4 she wakes up expecting b'fast ;-)

Gawd. I work with teenagers all day, so I think I'm not off my mark here when I say: he said, "when do I split the biRch?"
Not "when do I split the scene, mannnn?"

 

[Kenster]

Sometime after her last "O" and she falls asleep, but b4 she wakes up expecting b'fast ;-)

Maybe we're suppose to fill in the blanks here...

Sometime after splitting her last "Osage" round and she falls asleep, but she wakes up expecting to stack all of the splits b4 b'fast

 

[jhollist]

Don't have anything to add to the last few posts, but I do have some experience with river birch.

We had one next to our house that was taken down Sep 2010. This was before I had my fireplace (actually it isn't up and running yet, but it is in the house!).

It sat, in the shade, in rounds until Aug of this year. There was some fungus on a number of the pieces, but it certainly wasn't punky.

It also wasn't even remotely dry! Fresh splits are in the 35-40% range on my MM. So, as long as you don't plan on using it this year, I think letting it sit in rounds until you get the splitter won't be a problem.

 

[Danno77]

I don't have any experience with birch, but if it's that wet and we are approaching winter, I'd think it might be nice to wait until it freezes the rounds solid and you can bust 'em right up.

 

[Battenkiller]

In my experience, birch is one of those woods that really benefits from splitting after it is frozen hard. Stand them up on the frozen ground and go to town. The axe just drops right through the stuff.