Tamarack advice

Good morning! Looking for advice/opinions about using tamarack as fence posts. I’m planning an 8’ tall high tensile fence to keep deer out of a community garden. The board is unwaveringly against treated wood and cedar is out of the budget, so we’re getting tamarack logs. Area is Michigans Upper Peninsula, so we’re planning to set them 3-4’ deep.

Questions are:

1. Peel the logs or no? 1/3 of them already are peeled but the rest are being cut now and wont be unless we peel them. Since some already are, it might look better if we peel them all. But a local woman here used unpeeled tamarack for posts and got 30 years out of them before they rotted off.

2. Backfill the holes with pea gravel or no? Or something else? Same woman referred to above backfilled with gravel and they lasted 30 years.

3. Char the butts or no? Seems like this would help with longevity but will also add a lot of time and effort to the process and Im not sure if its worthwhile.

4. How likely are we to be able to pound fence staples into this stuff? I figure green maybe but dry, probably not. I do have access to a Milwaukee battery stapler so maybe that would work better than a hammer.

Any advice or opinions are appreciated!

In MN I never encountered a rotten Tammarac fence post…no matter how it was processed. That said, I am suspect all the measures you mention would help .

As a point of reference, when one of the local highways was repaved some years ago, some utility services attended to at the same time, not least water mains and sewers.  They pulled out tamarack water mains which were, or at least appeared to be, untreated.  They'd been bored through, peeled, banded with iron straps, presumably to better resist the internal pressure, and the ends were coned (male on one end, female on the other) so that they could be connected together.  I believe these were still in use at the time of removal/replacement, and had been since roughly the 1920s.  A length or two ended up in one of the historical museums, if I recall correctly.  Maybe I can find the article about the tamarack water mains in the newspaper's archives (wish me luck!).

Tamarack was often used historically in ground contact situations - railroad cross ties, post foundations for structures, sill logs for cabins and saunas, stulls (support timbers) in the mines, etc.  It's not black locust, but it's pretty rot resistant.

That being said, any or all of your proposed treatments and installation methods should help to prolong the lives of the fence posts.

Around here, there are very few large tamaracks which survived the mining era, and I don't know if the same is also true over by Iron River, but I have seen some big tamaracks in the swamps over by Stevenson and Carney - easy to spot in the fall when the needles turn, even at a full gallop, so to speak.  Smaller trees, good for fence posts, are common here, though.

And, speaking of black locust, we do have some around here, though I suspect we're at the ragged northern edge of the range.  Most of them seem to be on the fringes of residential neighborhoods, or perhaps that's just where they are most noticeable or I can plainly see them.  But, I don't much notice them out in the woods.  Still, locust would be hard to beat, if available.

Yes, and I forgot to mention the cord wood roads made from Tammarac laid though parts of northern Minnesota.  There was one 30 mile stretch I used to drive on every two weeks.

Tamarack was my grandmas favorite tree to point out in the swamps on the way to our cabin as a kid. For some reason I never thought of them being used as anything but a pretty wildlife stand. So pleased to learn there's a productive reason to source and plant these nostalgic beauties! I was going to plant them anyways but now I feel better about spending money on them.

Kevin Olson wrote:As a point of reference, when one of the local highways was repaved some years ago, some utility services attended to at the same time, not least water mains and sewers.  They pulled out tamarack water mains which were, or at least appeared to be, untreated.  They'd been bored through, peeled, banded with iron straps, presumably to better resist the internal pressure, and the ends were coned (male on one end, female on the other) so that they could be connected together.  I believe these were still in use at the time of removal/replacement, and had been since roughly the 1920s.  A length or two ended up in one of the historical museums, if I recall correctly.  Maybe I can find the article about the tamarack water mains in the newspaper's archives (wish me luck!).

Tamarack was often used historically in ground contact situations - railroad cross ties, post foundations for structures, sill logs for cabins and saunas, stulls (support timbers) in the mines, etc.  It's not black locust, but it's pretty rot resistant.

That being said, any or all of your proposed treatments and installation methods should help to prolong the lives of the fence posts.

Around here, there are very few large tamaracks which survived the mining era, and I don't know if the same is also true over by Iron River, but I have seen some big tamaracks in the swamps over by Stevenson and Carney - easy to spot in the fall when the needles turn, even at a full gallop, so to speak.  Smaller trees, good for fence posts, are common here, though.

And, speaking of black locust, we do have some around here, though I suspect we're at the ragged northern edge of the range.  Most of them seem to be on the fringes of residential neighborhoods, or perhaps that's just where they are most noticeable or I can plainly see them.  But, I don't much notice them out in the woods.  Still, locust would be hard to beat, if available.

You sound like a fellow Yooper! I just saw recent pictures of wooden water mains being dug up in Republic. They looked just like what you described. Pretty interesting!

I suspect Ive seen some black locust, or at least a relative here and there. Are they scraggly, rough, thorny trees with bean pod looking things? Definitely not many of them around but Ive seen a handful of them like that around neighborhoods like you said.

Brody Ekberg wrote:You sound like a fellow Yooper! I just saw recent pictures of wooden water mains being dug up in Republic. They looked just like what you described. Pretty interesting!

I suspect Ive seen some black locust, or at least a relative here and there. Are they scraggly, rough, thorny trees with bean pod looking things? Definitely not many of them around but Ive seen a handful of them like that around neighborhoods like you said.

Yeah, guilty as charged on being a Yooper!

Most of the locust I see are large shrubs or small trees, but there are a few in Ripley, across from the county garage which are proper tree sized.  That's a little micro-climate there - south facing slope, bares off early in the spring - so that might have helped them along.  There's one along the side of my brother's driveway, and it's maybe 8 feet tall and very spindly.  But, my brother plows with a bucket loader, and his neighbor up the hill plows with a skid steer, so I image it suffers some indignities in the course of snow removal!

They are thorny, with a compound leaf, white flowers in the spring and bean-like seed pods in the later summer or fall.  They are nitrogen fixers, good nectar source for bees and other pollinators, have edible seeds and very rot resistant wood.  My maternal grandfather told me "locust will last two years longer than stone" - not quite true, but it's very durable.  Locust thresholds and pegs (tree nails) were common uses, as well as fence posts.  Some established fence lines had a row of locust trees down the length; someone had used green locust fence posts, and the posts took root and grew.  Locally, it's classed as invasive, but Downstate it's native.  I have a sneaking hunch that as we continue to rebound from the last glacial maximum, they'll keep spreading northward into our neck of the woods, right up until the next ice age begins rather precipitously.  Though I am unlikely to be around to test my hypothesis!