Poplar - good for what?

A friend of ours has cut down some poplars and has offered us some of the wood.  They said for our wood-burning stove once it's seasoned but I'm not sure that it's so great for that.  Can anyone clue me in as to what you'd use poplar for???

Here's a link about someone who thinks it's good for something:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091127/ap_on_bi_ge/us_trees_for_development_new_mexico

Poplar isn't much use as firewood; it makes a lot of ash and doesn't produce much heat.  I guess if it's all you've got, though, you should use it.  Spruce isn't the best firewood in the world, either (although a lot better than poplar!) and that's about all we had in Alaska, so we used it and it kept us warm.

If you had a rocket stove, the leguminous shrubs talked about in that article would probably make better firewood than poplar.

Kathleen

Thanks.  I have a LOT to learn about wood.  That was great info that poplar gives up a lot of ash.  Is that the same for silver birch (we have a lot of those that need thinning out). All I know at present is that Oak is good for firewood.  If anyone has any info about other good woods or less good ones I'd be glad to have it.  Plus, does anyone have any links to good sites that show the barks of trees once they are cut.  I've a feeling that the local wood merchants could easily pull the wool over our eyes at the mo as we're so ignorant on the wood front.

You might want to get a good tree identification book -- it should have pictures of the bark, although bark alone isn't always going to be enough for identification. 

Birch, if dried (and it needs to be split to dry, as it will just rot otherwise), does made very good firewood.

Kathleen

innoculate!

fungus. poplar is useful for both edible and medicinal species. its a time and $ investment, but done well can compensate and return on the investment.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/u8h257qn2613k041/: some linited science with a few desireabel species

http://www.fungi.com/plugs/plugs.html: the pros. not to be disregarded.

Ive got cottonwood- populus trichcoarpa

boletes, oyster mushrooms, shiitake...I've had fair success with oysters.


also,dried wood is an an often disregarded soil ammendment as it is fairly void of plant nutrients PKN. however, its structural qualities are esential for bacteria, as well as fungus, and most other soil critters- imagina place with all the food you could eat but no shelter. this is often how ag soil specialists think of soil, only in terms of nutrients for plants. without the lignin and cellulose in decomposing wood ther eis not structure of 'buildings' which provide microorganisms to thrive. so its not a bad thing to simply let the logs 'rot'. it makes great soil

I often line up cbrush and logs in windrows in order to create the effect of swales on slopes. im not digging int the soil, but creating contour ridges which are essentially hugel beds. the y capture and cycle nutrients and water as the move downslope, concentrating them in walkable (and harvestable) ridges on my steep hills. you can do the same thing in areas with almost no pitch, but will have greater success if you plant the to in-

please see the wicking bed notes at : https://permies.com/permaculture-forums/2439_0/permaculture/wicking-raised-bed for ideas about how to use woody debris in a hugelbed type wicking irrigation system or grey water fed bed. for my design, wood is essential as it is a a great sponge when buried in the soil.

Deston, thank you for the idea to use woody debris to make swales on a slope.  We have a shallow slope, rather than a steep one, but because the soil is so heavy, we have a lot of run off.  Being in my fifties with a bad back, and the soil being so heavy, I've dreaded the thought of having to dig several hundred feet of swales.  But, I can get leaves from the yards of friends in town and make windrows of them, and I can make windrows of the straw from the tall grass I cut (all of it that's too mature to make good hay).  I may also be able to get some forest debris -- will have to work on that.  And moldy hay might be possible, too.

Kathleen

let lazy do your work! im glad that youve found some direction- the windrowed wood/debris is great habitat, helps capture and infiltrate almost as well as a swale, and works better the long it sits.

in a few years, or if you compost and soil the windrows, they will be plantable with all your wilder, more independent greens and so on.  and there will be mushrooms!

aspen/poplar is tricky for burning..and difficult to properly season..it will rot from the inside out if not properly seasoned and if allowed to sit on the ground it will soak up water like a sponge and rot.

properly seasoned poplar will burn in a wood furnace..we use it on days that we don't need to hold heat for a long time..like when it is in the 30's and 40's outside..and just need to bring up the temp some..

we keep a large woodpile of poplar seasoned and covered..stacked up off the ground and with lots of air space..

the smaller pieces are wonderful for kindling wood..the larger pieces if not split will hold fire longer than you think..and work fairly well in airtight woodstoves or furnaces..we have a huge wood furnace.

the damper wood will even burn as will the rotton..if given enough kindling..but..don't expect it to heat overnight..it will be useful when you have the time to keep an eye on your fire rather thanb when you are gone or sleeping.

don't waste it though..it is good for a fire if properly used.

you can also make a pretty lumber out of it..and it can be put into kugelkulture as it will rot well..

excuse misspelling above, hugelkulture

Hugelkultur (I think)

Poplar:  the mona lisa was painted on poplar!

The lumber is used .... as a "hardwood" - which seems a little odd to me.

From wikipedia:  "Poplar wood is also widely used in the snowboard industry for the snowboard core, because it has exceptional flexibility, and is sometimes used in the bodies of electric guitars and drums."

My impression is that poplar will grow if you just stick a poplar stick in the ground.  Like willow.

Some varieties of poplar will grow freaky tall, freaky fast.

Anybody know if poplar might be good to plant next to an outhouse (as a poop beast)?

For woodworking:  I think poplar is known for being slightly more flexible than most woods.  I have found a reference to a guy with a log cabin made out of poplar and it is over 30 years old and still going strong.

(googling)

Poplar appears to be very popular for paper these days.

...  I am reading several reports of don't plant them near septic tank drain fields as they will rip everything up - this makes me think they will make excellent poop beasts!

...  it is a common wood to use for pallets.  Some suggestions about using it for the innards of a couch.

...  I read where somebody liked using it for green wood projects.  Apparently, when it is green, it is very soft and easy to work.  And then when it dries it is very hard.  And it will shrink well around dry pegs without splitting - so you can make things that have no nails/screws or glue. 

... here is an interesting note:  If used as siding, it weathers well as long as it is vertical and not touching the soil.  The report is that it will last longer than you this way.  Untreated.  But!  If it is horizontal, it will last two years at most.  Fascinating!

... poplar is the most popular wood for the insides of cabinets.

... it is possible that poplar trees are very good at removing toxins from soils - I have read a few suggestions in this direction, but nothing terribly definite.

... the bark is good for baskets and ... shingles? 

...  the outer sapwood gets really nasty really fast.  If you are gonna use the wood, you will want to cut this off quickly. 

... apparently, some poplar wood will warp a lot when it is drying.

... some folks think poplar is the best wood for making bee hives.

...  I have read of at least six different people using tongue and groove poplar for indoor siding.

Regarding burning, I like this poem I found inside a bundle of firewood I bought (probably at a gas station):

Beech wood fires are bright and clear
- If the logs are kept a year.
Hickory's very good, they say,
- If for long it's laid away.
Birch and Pine logs burn too fast,
- Blaze up bright and do not last.
Elm wood burns like churchyard mold,
- Even the very flames are cold.
Persimmon fires are hot and near,
- If the logs are split and air.
Poplar gives a bitter smoke,
- Fills your eyes and makes you choke.
Oak and Maple, if dry and old,
- Keep away the winter cold.
Cherry wood will scent your room,
- With an incense like perfume.
But Ash wood wet and Ash wood dry,
- A king shall warm his slippers by!

I liked it so much I hung it in one of my cabinets...

paul unfortunately that is not true about poplar being easy to grow...once you have a quaking aspen, you have a forest though..as they do spread by a huge root system..

One tree a forest makes.

if you cut one down it sends up thousands of suckers from the roots in the ground and in one season they can be 25 ' or more tall.

they are short lived ..esp if they get a nick or cut in them, they will disease very easily and die..but they make a lovely forest duff as they fall and die as they will rot completely if left for any time on the wet floor of the forest..and that provides nursery for any other living organisms.

aspens are a wierd tree as they have a very soft soft smooth bark when young, which very easily will damage, but when they mature the bottom to the top they begin to form a woody bark..takes a while though..even older aspens can still have immature bark.

it is really odd to find an old aspen tree, but we do have some here..

our forests began with just 3 aspen trees here.

it is difficult to cut them out..yhou have to pull out all of the root branches along with the trunks, or you'll have trees.

it is best if you do not use poplar wood for outdoor projects..as it will rot quickly if left to weather..even for fences..as we have used it before for fencing and it doesn't last..even if not touching the ground. i certainly would not recommend it for siding or shingles....as in my experience any wood left outdoors for any length of time is better for your hugel beds !!

I often work with cottonwood, (populas tricocarpa) both in our sawmill and reestablishing these trees in riparian areas.  In the mill we sell cottonwood for truck decks, bridge decking, barn floors or any other surface that might be severely abused.  It is soft when green, but when it dries, you can barely drive a nail into it.  Once dry it is very stable; however it does tend to twist in the drying.  We sell this wood for about $2.00 per board foot. 

Cottonwood is relatively easy to establish.  We use seedlings grown from seed.  Rooted cuttings work ok, but often take years to get their roots structured correctly.  A seed grown cottonwood grows much faster and is more drought tolerent.

We often reestablish or increase the size of cottonwood groves by lightly scarifying the roots and allowing them to sprout.  We get about 3 feet of growth per year from the sprouts here in Montana.

Brenda,

I think that aspens might be worthy of a whole new thread!

paul wheaton wrote:My impression is that poplar will grow if you just stick a poplar stick in the ground.  Like willow.

Some varieties of poplar will grow freaky tall, freaky fast.

For us, this is absolutely true. We call them weeds in our area, which is the East beaches area of Manitoba, Canada. I have used several of them in hugel mounds. In one of the mounds, now two years old, the tree has grown up through all the soil and other ingredients to grow up from being vertical on the mound. My husband has used the chainsaw to chop them down, down to an one-foot stump. They grow up (an unintentional coppicing, I found here) like crazy the next season, becoming very bushy.

Poplar buds have so much nectar, a honeybee cannot get it all in one trip from one blossom.   For other flowering plants, a bee might have to visit 100 blossoms before returning to the hive to offload.   I’m talking about the yellow tulip poplar like we have on the east coast.   Also makes excellent boards for building, most of our outbuildings are made from lumber milled on our property.   That is also our primary firewood source and we heat our home with it.  It burns clean, and easily, but for really cold weather we throw in a little locust, dogwood or oak for higher BTUs.   The leaves are high in protein and good for ruminants.  I dry some for winter forage for the goats, and they eat whatever they can reach green, or wind blown off the trees.   The buds are good food for native wildlife like squirrels.  In a really bad year when a late frost killed most of the poplar buds, squirrels turned to our fruit trees for sustenance instead, not good for us!  What little fruit survived on the pear or apple trees was ravaged by them long before it ripened.  

I have a lot of respect for poplar trees.  They grow insanely fast and you have to be careful when felling them because of the tendency to twist when they fall.  Notching as you would for other trees does not always work on poplar and it is best to cable them when cutting to apply tension in the direction they need to fall.  We had a large one, 260 feet tall, rubbing on the power lines.  For years we had called the power company to come and cut it off the lines, but we weren’t considered an emergency so it was put off.   Finally, my 80 year old husband got out there, cabled it, cut a wedge and jacked it up on one side to make it fall correctly.  It was a few feet from the power line and it fell perfectly but unfortunately that meant taking out the garden fence and two of my fruit trees.  However, we feel it was a small price to pay for getting the job done.  No more intermittent power outages from it rubbing and loosening the power lines.   He cut it into board lumber and made a nice workshop out of it.  

Not to suggest incorrectness in a previous post, but I have experience that some poplars do start very easily from cuttings. I don't have experience with aspens, or all types of poplar. These were hybrid poplars, intended for exceedingly fast growth. The cuttings were able to be frozen in the freezer even, to wait until the ground could be ready for them in spring.

In wet spots, they had a really hard time establishing, but in other places, such as in garden soil, well - don't plant them in your garden unless you have to. Some of them kept coming back from root fragments for years, even though the area was tarped in winter, and managed as an annual veg garden during the season. Not the end of the world, or as crazy as bamboo, but make sure you want them where you plant them. They can make very big roots very fast.

That said, as others pointed out, they are short-lived, and even when they are not cut down, they sucker VERY muchly. Be especially careful with them near septic beds, which is the reason I need to cut down a few this fall. They are starting to die, and are suckering in a really extended area, getting close to my weeping bed for the septic system.

I am going with inoculating the logs with mushroom spawn, mostly Oyster and Reishi.

I recommend Field and Forest as an excellent source of spawn, and information. They have some really good strains of various mushroom species there, and some tools that can speed up the work, such as angle grinder adaptors and bits. For myself, I decided to use a plunge router for my mushroom inoculating this coming fall.

Some basics to remember if you do want to inoculate: the time of year they are cut matters a lot. You want to ideally cut them when 1/2-3/4 of the leaves have fallen, and temps are therefore low enough to really slow the spores from other species of fungi, to help get yours established. That is one of the major things that can go wrong - non-target fungi have already invisibly taken hold of the log before you even put your target spawn in.

Next, wait 2 weeks after cutting the trees - before that, the tree has a natural 'immune system' which reduces the chances of establishing the mushrooms you want. After that, the risk of other spores colonizing the tree naturally increases.

These details may make using the poplars you mention not appropriate for a mushroom project, but something to consider the next time a poplar comes down at the right season.

That said, these are not rules carved in stone.  If you have the time and money to experiment, trying to inoculate in less than ideal conditions could still be good experience to gain, and prove that exceptions are possible.

I am only familiar with the tree called Hybrid Poplar.

A long time ago, we were visiting a friend who was bragging about his poplar tree.  He cut a limb off and told dear hubby to stick it in the ground and it would grow.  And yes, that tree grew very fast and made a great shade tree when we had our homestead.

Reading the previous post all the way back to 2009 I feel folks are talking about many different varieties of poplar.

There are around 35 species of trees in the genus Populus, or poplar

https://www.thespruce.com/popular-poplar-trees-5093743

You can always use Poplar wood to make more biochar, which has numerous excellent uses in the landscape. Since heat output is not the goal here they should work fine, and you should get a good reduction in volume as well.

Kathleen Sanderson wrote:Poplar isn't much use as firewood; it makes a lot of ash and doesn't produce much heat.  I guess if it's all you've got, though, you should use it.  Spruce isn't the best firewood in the world, either (although a lot better than poplar!) and that's about all we had in Alaska, so we used it and it kept us warm.

If you had a rocket stove, the leguminous shrubs talked about in that article would probably make better firewood than poplar.

My experience has been quite different. I burned white poplar and black (balsam) poplar in a high-efficiency wood stove for 13 years. It served me well.

Naturally, I can understand why people who have abundant dense hardwoods available would turn up their noses at poplar firewood, which has much less energy density per volume.

Here's the trick: poplar has to be handled correctly when it is harvested. It has a lot of sugars, and if it's left to sit it will decompose rapidly. I'm pretty sure that's where the "low heat, high ash" comments come from -- trying to burn punky wood.

Poplar must be cut green, preferably in winter when the water content is lower. And, critically, it must be bucked and split immediately, and loose-stacked so it dries quickly. When dried quickly, it makes decent firewood (in my opinion). Even though it's not oak.

may neighbor bought a 1000+ board foot bundle of culled poplar lumber from local sawmill for $150 and built a huge barn with it used it for all the walls, spanning roof rafters and all the livestock stalls using cedar tree poles for the frame and roof rafters with over hanging tin roof. its still standing strong at least 6 years now. poplar trees around here grow tall fat and straight.
ive used yellow poplar as firewood and it works ok with the mix of random dead trees I use to heat with. its at least as good as sassafras, probably better than soft maple and much better than box elder

It just occurred to me that our short growing season might mean that our poplar is a lot more slow growing, and so more dense than in southern climes. The same applies to Manitoba Maple (box elder?) which is also decent stove wood here. Some species of willow too. Hm.

Brenda Groth wrote:paul unfortunately that is not true about poplar being easy to grow...once you have a quaking aspen, you have a forest though

This is something that confuses me. Aspen is a poplar, that is, in the genus Populus. But it's clear not just from this quote, but from other conversations I've observed that people mean something else when discussing poplar. And I'm not sure then, when e.g. a PEP BB instructs me to plant poplar and willow as poop-beasts whether that includes the aspen that's prevalent here.

Douglas Alpenstock wrote:

Kathleen Sanderson wrote:Poplar isn't much use as firewood; it makes a lot of ash and doesn't produce much heat.

My experience has been quite different. I burned white poplar and black (balsam) poplar in a high-efficiency wood stove for 13 years. It served me well.
...
Here's the trick: poplar has to be handled correctly when it is harvested. It has a lot of sugars, and if it's left to sit it will decompose rapidly. I'm pretty sure that's where the "low heat, high ash" comments come from -- trying to burn punky wood.

So there's some dispute about the ashiness, but even if it's true, there are burning applications where ashiness is desirable. When firing a kiln full of ceramics, that ash is gold -- leaving nerdles of snotty residue all over the surface of your ware. (The problem is the solution!)