Does anybody ever tried hazel as firewood or for gasification?
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Cody, here black alder is the premium gunpowder charcoal. Swiss use hazel l belive…
Kamil, hazel works great for both! Fantastic firewood too, but its not efficiant in terms of wood farming. It grows fast from the stump once copiced but rarely grows past 2". Once past this size, it kinda stagnates and dont form much biomass anymore
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Coppice techniques are your best bet to maximize bio-mass / energy production. There are a number of species that coppice well, most listed above. Willow, Alder and Poplar are common ones, though willow is the most popular. As already mentioned… those coppiced tree “canes” are perfect chunker food.
My research is showing Alder fixes nitrogen but Willow does not? Other nitrogen fixing tree types include Black Locust, Mimosa, Redbud, Autumn Olive, Kentucky Coffee Tree, Golden Chain Tree, Acacia, Mesquite. Out of that list Alder sticks out as the most likely combination of N2 fixing and coppicing.
Willow loves moist soil and has aggressive, wide ranging roots. That can be good or bad depending on the circumstance. I thought willow would make an interesting filtration system for mixed gray water streams or livestock runoff. Make waste… not waste…
Related to nitrogen fixation… Azolla is water fern that fixes nitrogen and grows extremely fast under the right circumstances, readily absorbing potassium and phosphorous from “waste” streams and fixing nitrogen right out of the air. You wouldn’t burn it for fuel but composting the azolla creates a powerful soil amendment as the fern concentrates the same three components (N/P/K) that fertilizer is designed to deliver.
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Cleaning up the yard at work and had a bunch of framed pallets, time to get to work
Time to crank up the heater! Most of these are dripping wet from being out in the yard in the rain. One nice thing about water logged pallets is the twisted drive nails come out very easily from the swollen and softened wood. Should be a few days fuel when it’s dried and chunked. All nice Doug fir 2x4, 2x6, 3x2 and 4x4 material. A little disheartening seeing good lumber go to the fuel supply but I have plenty of this stuff stored at home for projects and it’s a never ending supply as long as I work here
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Besides it is a lot easier to cut the wood on a table saw for your Wood gasifer to use.
I (WOOD) (pun) love to get my hands on pallets like those for the wood to reuse on some of my projects I want to build.
When you get your chunker built it changes everything in time spent making fuel. Minutes instead of hours to make the same amount. I know there are big truck differentials or hay bailer differentials fly wheel boxes around for free.
If I find one I will let you know. My square bailer was only 15 miles from where I live. With the tires good and aired up.
Bob
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Wood Supply
Just like having gas in the tank or money in the bank . 
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so much goodness, so many miles!
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Little prechunking on lunch break today, cut the pallets down and axe split to a easy thickness to feed through the table saw
I’ll cut each bag with a arm load of the damp cherry wood tonight
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Marcus, your wife definitely loves you.
,
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sure it fits, you put the fur on a stick of WOOD!!! 
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You guys are confused about what to do with wood and beavers.
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Well she ate a muskrat for breakfast and beaver fat for dinner, And seemed to like it mixed with some rocket fuel Doug fir cherry mix, actually get a little better milage then normal on the beaver fat. I won’t say that as fact on a single test but I’ll be doing it again
I’ll be doing some chunking for Thanksgiving, pallet wood lumber and cherry wood
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With a little sunshine I took the oppertunity to haul another week’s worth of firewood. Who knows, soon we may be wading in snow and I’ll prefer utilizing the the stacks close the throw-in slot.
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Hauled another IBC today.
And planted 10 black alders. Two feet high, three feet from each other. Easy cutting in the future if they are all together. Cant wait to see how they will do.
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Are those super fast growing trees Joep? A guy down the road a ways from me planted some kind of Hybrid poplars about twenty years ago. The grew about 5 foot a year. He wanted them for privacy and didn’t keep them pruned so they made branches nearly to the ground. They are about 60 ft high now and shed a lot of small branches every year. They don’t lose their leaves for at least a month after all the hardwood trees do.
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That place looks beautiful.
What’s the “wall” on the left ?
Are those living trees?
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Thanks, it is two acres not far from our house. The wall were/are conifers, 45 feet high 20 years old. The first time we stepped on this ground we were in love, you step into another world. The neighbour farmer bought a landplot and started complaining about the conifers, they are 20 feet wide and half on his property, two hectare / five acres. With a mower he cut them back a few times (children crying every time). And in a storm there were a few on his land. At that moment I had a ruptured hamstring, got operated and I am happy that it still hanging there, got my female period for two months, never had so much pain and I had my share of broken bones. At that moment I had them cut down, impossible cutting those big trees. But since that farmer was mower the first 6m/20 feet, they survived. Charme of the landplot is gone but we have a lot of firewood. We cut off around 8m/24 feet. Wood is getting real bad now, this all happened in 2015, cut the trees in 2017, and the farmer sold his land in 2018. Man, I was pissed.
But I enjoyed the silence yesterday, it still is another world. The kids give parties overthere, I can play around and on a sunday we take a walk there. Not bothered by any lockdown just living our own life.
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