Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2008/04/25
[Author Prev] [Author Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next] [Author Index] [Topic Index] [Home] [Search]Frank, >>Your 100 year old Oak tree is maybe worth a thousand dollars as lumber...... wholesale.<< I had a number of people ask if they could come cut it up. The trunk is large enough that slabs from it can be used to make tabletops. I told everyone they could have it for free. Nobody took me up on it. On a similar note, my brother raises walnuts in California. Walnut orchards are comprised of English walnuts grafted onto black walnut root stock. English walnuts -- and there are a number of varieties -- are more desirable for eating, cooking, etc. But English walnuts aren't very hardy. The roots are weak and prone to disease. Black walnut rootstock is very hardy. Black walnut trees will even grow quite well in the wild. But the nuts are messy, extremely difficult to shell, have low yield (not much meat) and therefore are not commercially viable. Thus in commercial production English walnut is grafted onto black walnut rootstock. If you look at any commercial walnut tree you can see where the black walnut (dark and very course bark) stops and the English walnut (white and very thin bark) begins. Black walnut is very good wood, as I'm sure you're aware. It's very dark and extremely hard. Black walnut is what's used for making furniture, gunstocks, etc. English walnut wood is soft. It doesn't even make good firewood (burns poorly and has lots of ash). When a walnut farmer takes out an orchard -- and due to a certain disease a lot of the older orchards in California have been removed in the last two decades -- people will come and ask to buy the black walnut trunks. It wasn't uncommon for a grower to give the black walnut trunks away if the person taking them will haul off the English walnut wood as well. (Many years ago in California you could just pile and burn everything that you didn't want. Not so anymore.) Several people wanted the trunks from my brother's orchard. My brother ended up telling a friend that he could have the wood. My brother left town the weekend after he had the orchard cut down, about 15 acres in all. When he returned nearly all the prime black walnut wood had been removed. He called his friend, to ask if or when he was going to haul off the rest. His friend knew nothing about it. Someone had apparently come in and taken (stolen) all the black walnut trunks. We're not talking about a pickup truck full, mind you. We're talking semi-truck loads. This was an old orchard. There were dozens and dozens of trees and some of the trunks were pretty massive. Removal involved some big trucks and heavy equipment. I don't know if it still happens -- this was some years ago -- but for a time I guess it was common practice by some unscrupulous people to go grab black walnuts trunks when an orchard was taken out. If they got caught they'd just say, "hey I thought I was doing you a favor by helping you get rid of some of your wood." Sounds crazy, I know, but it's not like walnut farmers make their living on selling wood. A good orchard might last a lifetime. Wood removal is something that's a PITA to deal with. Sorry for this long and off-topic story. It's just that agriculture is interesting. There's a lot behind the food you see on grocery shelves. Most people are probably unaware that walnuts will only grow well on best soils (close to the 100 max rating on the Storie index), or that soil everywhere has been mapped and rated. Soil type is the reason you find a lot of walnut orchards near rivers, where the alluvial soils are the right mix of sand and loam and the drainage is excellent. A lot of the walnut orchards that have been removed in California have been replaced by almonds, which don't require soil that's quite as good....or by subdivisions, which is another story. I once made a living doing agricultural photography, though I never made enough to afford a Leica then. :-) I was proud to get my dream camera of then, a Nikon F2SB which I used for this self portrait in 1978. http://www.purplehen.com/images/ELCENTRO.JPG I was in El Centro, CA for a story on cotton farming. Poor scan of an old Ektachrome. (Not much of a shot, I'll admit. My forte at the time was photographing plants and bugs for Ortho Lawn and Garden.) FWIW, here's some info on soil rating. http://anrcatalog.ucdavis.edu/pdf/3203.pdf DaveR