What to do with a BIG dead tree?

We moved to our happy hillside  3 years ago, a half-acre wooded lot on a suburban street just up the hill from a goat farm. Unfortunately we had a number of hundred-year-old oak trees near the house that were sharing too many of their branches with us at random times. They had to be cut down, which we found out is not cheap, but is a little bit cheaper if you dispose of the wood yourself. That left us wondering what to do with literally tons of wood and unsightly stumps.

We still think keeping the cut wood was a good choice. It saved us thousands of dollars in clean-up fees, and gave me an unexpected but not unwelcome workout schedule for nearly a month. We used the timber to fashion terraces on our heavy clay slope, backfilling the spaces with branches, leaves, and organic debris. We now have a series of five new garden beds that are still moist and green even after three weeks of drought.  

We're encouraging the stumps to decay in their own time as hugelkultur beds. One has become a productive dewberry patch, and another a small multipurpose garden.

Definitely a 'problem is the solution' moment. One might even say a nice problem to have!

Seems like it might be time to consider investing in a woodstove!  Especially if you have more old trees fixing to come down or need dropping!  Is there no demand for firewood in your area?  And a big, sound oak, (judging from the look of the logs in your photos), might find interest among woodworkers.

Thanks for sharing!  You turned an eyesore into something beautiful.

Firewood!!

Oak is worth hanging onto if you can. Dense enough that it burns well for years, and sound oak is genuinely useful for woodworkers if you know anyone local. The stump situation is the real headache though. We had a couple of big ones and ended up just letting them rot in place, planted some wine caps around the base and they went absolutely mad.

"Unsightly Stump" is in the eye of the beholder.

If you know someone with a chainsaw, have them chainsaw out the middle of the stump from the top and you have a natural planter! If you don't want to plant into the hole, fill it with sawdust and give it regular doses of Fertilizer P, and it should rot faster.  And yes, I expect the right kinds of mushrooms would happily live on it!

Jay Angler wrote:"Unsightly Stump" is in the eye of the beholder.

If you know someone with a chainsaw, have them chainsaw out the middle of the stump from the top and you have a natural planter! If you don't want to plant into the hole, fill it with sawdust and give it regular doses of Fertilizer P, and it should rot faster.  And yes, I expect the right kinds of mushrooms would happily live on it!

We did just that, filling natural cracks with P, old coffee and compost tea. After a year I chopped a bowl out of the middle of one of them, which promptly filled back up with oak bracket fungus. A year later I cleared that out, then kept digging all the way to soil.  That stump is now a collar for a new apple tree. Another one is growing a ginkgo.

Jay Angler wrote:"Unsightly Stump" is in the eye of the beholder.

If you know someone with a chainsaw, have them chainsaw out the middle of the stump from the top and you have a natural planter! If you don't want to plant into the hole, fill it with sawdust and give it regular doses of Fertilizer P, and it should rot faster.  And yes, I expect the right kinds of mushrooms would happily live on it!

I can confirm thanks to years of controlled studies that peeing on stumps does indeed make them go away faster. It's like magic, only slower.

Great choice on terracing with them. Dead standing trees are amongst the most beneficial habitat features, but of course can be dangerous around a house. I cannot think of a good reason longterm for paying for exporting the wood.

Ben Zumeta wrote:Great choice on terracing with them. Dead standing trees are amongst the most beneficial habitat features, but of course can be dangerous around a house. I cannot think of a good reason longterm for paying for exporting the wood.

Agreed. The ones further out are encouraged to topple in their own way, on their own timetable.