Cherry wood - what to do with it?

Our neighbours very recently gave their mature cherry tree a rather major prune. Well, more of a brutal decapitation, but maybe I'm just a bit overly emotional. Anyway, the upshot is that there is a big pile of branches, and trunk, which need to be removed. Usually they would gather them all up into a big pile and burn them before fire season sets in, but we've been telling them all about our rocket-mass heater and how it will happily keep our place heated using sticks. So they very kindly offered them all to us rather than waste them.



I've been busy lopping off the smaller bits and fetching the bigger bits over closer to the saw bench. So far I'm about half way through the job and this is the heap I've generated. Rock for scale, because that's his favourite job.



The biggest bits of trunk are still to be hauled over and are around 7" in diameter.

My issue is that whilst its a nice contribution to next winter's fuel supply, it seems too good to burn. So I'd like to experiment making things out of it. Wooden coasters seem the obvious first experiment. Then maybe flat spatulas. Maybe I could try a spoon, or even a small bowl!

What I need to know is how long should it be seasoned before trying to make things from it? Or is it best just to have a go with the wood fresh when it's softer and easier to work? If I need to season it, how long for? And should I coat the cut ends with anything so it doesn't dry out too quickly?

Anyone have any other ideas of things I could make with the wood? A wand seems tempting...

All suggestions gratefully received.

I've always tried to whittle cherry wood when it is green. It is a tough wood once dried and can be a bit of a bear. It takes nicely to detail work as I've found I have pretty good control while working with it.

If you need some kitchen utensils, maybe it would be worth making a spatula or scraper as it will wear nice and slow lasting for some time.

The spoon-carving tradition that's experiencing increased popularity right now expects the wood to be green. As does carving bowls on a pole lathe. Any of that kind of work is going to be much easier now than it will be after drying. But I think if you're doing more typical modern woodworking with all the mechanization of a modern shop -- planers and saws and lathes and sanders..., then you'd dry it first.

You need to slow down the drying process to minimize cracking/splitting. Varnish the ends maybe with some polyurethane varnish and leave in a damp place. You might even have to store a while in a bag with damp sawdust or wood chips. Cherry is great for things like handles, doorknobs, other tools (handles for chisels), facing for wood vice, ornamental boxes etc.

John Gould wrote:You need to slow down the drying process to minimize cracking/splitting. Varnish the ends maybe with some polyurethane varnish and leave in a damp place. You might even have to store a while in a bag with damp sawdust or wood chips. Cherry is great for things like handles, doorknobs, other tools (handles for chisels), facing for wood vice, ornamental boxes etc.

Can I suggest beeswax instead? I think we can come up with a lot of natural varnishes or sealants. Rosin?

Cherry is also a good wood to make musical instruments out of, as it is hard and fine and has good qualities of resonance.

M Ljin wrote:

John Gould wrote:You need to slow down the drying process to minimize cracking/splitting. Varnish the ends maybe with some polyurethane varnish...

Can I suggest beeswax instead? I think we can come up with a lot of natural varnishes or sealants. Rosin?

Well as it happens I have beeswax! And it does seem very appropriate to use my own beeswax on it. Would some olive oil on the cut end first help, then the wax on top?

I'm going to try to finish sorting out the rest of the wood tomorrow and bring all the big bits over. Then sort out some likely pieces to seal up and put to season somewhere, and then a few to try carving green. I think I'll start with a wand, because it sounds the simplest. Then spoons. Then when the wood is seasoned a bit I can do things with machines, like coasters and flat spatulas.

How long should I leave it to season? Does it depend on the diameter of the branch?

M Ljin wrote:Cherry is also a good wood to make musical instruments out of, as it is hard and fine and has good qualities of resonance.

Well I've had a harp on my wish list since forever.

Maybe it's a tad too ambitious though. Is it?

My understanding is a harp is a box with strings attached.

Do you have any less valuable wood to practice on first? Trying something small and scrappy first could help, where you are just playing around. Earlier this winter I made my first working string instrument—a weedy boxelder sapling, half a gourd, some birch bark, a few tuning pegs… it has problems but it works! Sort of. It made it a lot less scary for my next one, which I made little modifications on for months afterward.

They say wood for musical instruments has to be aged for years. I haven’t done that but I used seasoned firewood… there should be plenty of opportunities for practice if you set some aside.

The inner bark is great for coughs. Just peel it out of the bark, when you strip it off. It can then be simmered into a concentrated decoction, then add honey & (for longer shelf life, vodka or another spirit, to make syrup,  or it can be dried and speed for tea or tinctures.

First thing that I would recommend would be to saw it in such a way that the core will be removed from the pieces - it will prevent expansion from the center that cracks the wood the most. Then you can dry the quarters or saw them into planks and dry them under load (or strapped). While it's drying (at least 2-3 years, depending on the climate) you will have time to figure out what to do with it.

Carla Burke wrote:The inner bark is great for coughs. Just peel it out of the bark, when you strip it off. It can then be simmered into a concentrated decoction, then add honey & (for longer shelf life, vodka or another spirit, to make syrup,  or it can be dried and speed for tea or tinctures.

Would you dry it first or is it okay to use the fresh bark?

I love to save the bark from things for medicine, and was thinking to suggest this myself, but don’t have any experience with cherry bark in particular.

There's more moisture in it, if it's not dried, but I'm not sure if it's enough to affect the abv, in a tincture. Generally a lower abv spirit (40 - 50) is used with dried, and higher (70 - 80ish) with fresh - but I'm truly unsure how much difference it will make with the cambium/inner bark. For tea, absolutely. I like to dry most of my herbs, so it can be stored longer, without liquid.

It will be a whole lot easier to separate the inner bark while the wood is green.

I have made a number of utensils from black cherry. The wood I have used has always been seasoned, though I could cut a green tree if I wanted.There is one I intend to harvest for lumber that I could set aside some carving wood from.

I like to find a piece that has a bit of bend in it for spoons and spatulas. Spatulas especially benefit from a bend so the grain is straight in the handle and the blade.

Hello,

I know that it doesn't really have anything to do with woodworking. Though, I'm just throwing out the idea, another option would be to us some of the larger logs for cultivating mushrooms. Chestnut and Nameko grow very well on cherry wood. It's also reported to be compatible with Shitake mushrooms. There are many websites around that sells the inoculation tools - here's one such site... https://fieldforest.net

Best of luck.

Well there's certainly been a lot of food for thought here - thanks guys!

The first thing I wanted to check was whether or not this cherry bark will have the same medicinal effect as the wild cherry referred to in most of the info I can find about cherry bark online, which seems to be black cherry, Prunus serotina whereas this one is sweet cherry, Prunus avium.

Fortunately our own wonderful Judson Carroll has a wonderful video about cherry bark which immediately put my mind to rest - all cherry barks have the same components, though some may not be as strong.



It's raining right now, but as soon as it stops I'm going out there to choose myself a nice little branch to practice my whittling skills (currently pretty much non-existent, though I do have a basic set of tools somewhere...) on and put it somewhere the rain can dry off it for a few hours, then I can begin my little cherry-wood adventure by removing the bark and drying it for future use in cough remedies.

Burra, great addition to the woodpile, I burn some wild cherry but cut smaller(9 to 14 inch) s8nce it takes year or two to season.  

And hey, if you carve a wand initially, you could make the kitchen items magically appear fully carved!

Rosa rescued one of the smaller bits of cherry that I've been trimming.

She says that cherries are part of the rose family, therefore she needs to rescue those flowers and experiment with an Ikebana style flower arrangement.

Also I should apparently rescue the bark for making cough medicine.

And then make a magic wand!

That should keep me out of mischief for a while...

I found the whittling knives and we used one of them to peel the bark off the stick.

I've put it in one of those hanging herb nets to dry I'll probably peel a few more as it's a simple job I can do sitting down so it doesn't impact my energy levels or ability to do standing-up jobs.

We also put the little twigs with flower buds in a vase. I'm not sure if the flowers will open, but if they do I'll take a photo.

The question I have though is whether the bark I have is the stuff I need? Or should I be using that green layer underneath? Or both?

I think it’s the inner bark you would want to save, not the outer—most of the time that is better since it is still alive, whereas the outer layer is dead.

Cherry bowls and spoons made from green wood which is why the bowls are not round anymore - a result of different drying speed of the end grain vs long grain. Way easier to turn greenwood vs seasoned wood. I like the natural look of greenwood bowls.

I see a perfect Y shaped branch in the pile perfect base for a saw buck just as it is. The Y branch plus 2 similarly sized straight branches to complete the saw buck no tools needed.

Time for an update!

We finished hauling all the cut wood out from under the tree and have trimmed all the big pieces and stashed them in the log pile for sorting and cutting.

It's grown since the last photo!



It's also flowering...



I brought some of the twigs inside so I could watch the buds open.



And here's a photo of the pruned tree, which seems to be recovering from its rather brutal pruning.



The wires behind it are part of the overhead catenary supplying power to the trains, in case anyone was wondering.

Kirsten - those bowls look wonderful! We do have a lathe, but it's not set up yet and we don't really have the space for it. And I don't think we have the right sort of chuck for turning bowls. I might restrict myself to learning to carve for a while and see how things go, but I'll be coming back and looking at those photos for inspiration occasionally. Nice to know you can turn it green. I love the non-symmetrical look to them as they dry. I suspect I'm more of a green-wood person...

Hi all,

I agree with most of what the others have been suggesting. Yes you can carve it, and my better half and I used the overhanging branches from our apricot and cherry trees to teach ourselves how to start carving wooden spoons. From the outset we had diverging "spoon carving strategies".

My better half: She made a small spoon with a reasonably nice piece of wood from the outset.

My insane approach: I basically looked at the conventional wisdom of choosing a nice piece of wood, and intentionally ignored it. Not because I "knew better" (because I didn't), but I wanted to see just how difficult wood with knots, and the pith was to carve.... I looked at it as a "real world experience on what not to do" so I could learn to identify the issues and adapt if I ever needed to. As far as I was concerned, it was free wood, so why not?

My first two carving experiences were extremely different from one another, in terms of wood used.

1. The first (ladle) was knotty, pith-ridden green apricot.
2. The second (spatula)  was aged, fully dried and extremely hard ironbark timber from a 100 year old railway sleeper offcut.



Meanwhile, my better half quickly found that hand carving things was too painful for her, so she was using power tools to carve/sand, and she used apricot and a cherry wood exclusively.... in the same time that I carved the two above, she had carved this:




It's really funny, she's the bigger spoon carver of the both of us... but I think I'm the slightly more patient carver.

That said... going beyond carving cherry wood....

For any serious barbecue fans out there, or food smoking gurus, fruit woods are some of the most prized woods to make smoking chips out of, after the usual Mesquite/Hickory/Old wine barrel options.

Here's my cold smoker being used to smoke spices and seasonings....



Here I've labelled which woods I've smoked with, and how long:



I sometimes sell them in a local craft shop for some extra money....



They were so popular I got a phone call from the shop pleading to make more... so I may have gone a little overboard...



The image above was just one of three boxes of smoked spices I made... They make great gifts to foodies, and are great finishing salts. That said, if you use them in the cooking phases, the smokiness is almost completely lost.

Anyway, that's what our household uses cherry woods for!


All the best in your cherry wood endeavours!

Ham.

To slow the drying process, you can use beeswax to coat the ends.  It is the fast loss of water that makes the cracks.

I had an apricot orchard that supplied me with a lot of “wood too pretty to burn”.  I got teased about that!  And wood that had bending shapes which had curving grain..

I made towel racks and coat hooks out of curved apricot wood

If you slice it lengthwise you can get some beautiful wood.  You could make small boxes or a mosaic or any small wooden item.

Small pieces with extraordinary grain could be jewelry.  Slices of ~1 inch sticks could be buttons.

You can just keep the pieces with the most potential for later!

I second Hamish McFadden's motion: be sure to keep the chips produced from whittling and carving for use in the smoker!  Buying fruitwood chips for your smoker isn't too expensive, but if you have a free source, an activity that already produces wood shavings, why not use it?

And if you don't have a smoker, you should get one.  I love mine, though I surely don't use it as often as I should.  Mine is an electric chip smoker that I bought used at a good price.  But you can turn just a regular charcoal grill into a smoker for $10 with a smoke tube.  I bought this one: smoke tube  I actually plan to use it in conjunction with my electric smoker, which has a weakness in that it doesn't produce nearly as much smoke at lower temperatures.

On that note, I point out that both my electric smoker and my smoke tube are designed for hot smoking.  I suppose that the tube could be used in a cold smoking situation, but I'm not sure how well that would work.  Generally speaking, cold smoker set ups are more complicated than hot smokers.

My friend in Maryland makes bagpipes.

Regarding cherry bark medicine:
Easier than boiling it and then adding vodka as a preservative is tincturing it (soaking it in the vodka) and then adding sugar or honey to make it thick and tasty.
Yes, it's the inner bark that's medicinal, but if you just peel the bark off the wood with a potato peeler, you don't have to separate it, you can just use it all because you will be straining it out anyway. Fresh or dried works, but if you're going to tincture it, there's no reason to bother drying it first. Drying is primarily for if you need to store it a while. If you want to make tea you separate the inner bark and dry it.

Regarding carving:
My husband and I recently took a spoon carving class. Partly power tools, partly hand tools. We found dry fruit wood quite workable. And it's ready to finish when you're done carving and doesn't warp.

Cherry is a beautiful wood to work with machines, and it has a lovely appearance when finished with oil.  I'd hunt around for a local woodworking club or group of wood-loving artisans.  You may be able to bargain a portion of the wood for something you'd really like made with the cherry by someone who could show you their work in advance.  

A local wood turner might LOVE to have some wood … they could make round things:  bowls cups lamp bases etc

I bought a redwood salad bowl with a crack in it.  The man told me dry wood was stable wood.  I was skeptical of that but bought the bowl. That was 30 years ago. I still have that bowl and that crack has never changed shape.  The man didn’t lie

Burra, Thank you for sharing your knowledge about Black Cherry bark. I had no idea that it had medicinal qualities. I have a friend and two daughters that make natural medicines so, going forward, I will start harvesting some bark for them...If your whittling knife is a Flexcut brand, I'm pretty sure the handle is Cherry