What would you do with chopped down diseased chestnut trees?

Hi everybody,

I live in a small town in the Netherlands. One of the things I loved most when we moved here is that the main streets are lined with these beautiful, ancient chestnut trees.

In the coming weeks the city council is chopping them all down because they have been infected with a bacteria, Pseudomonas syringae. In Dutch it's called 'chestnut blood sickness'.

They're not saidd what they're doing with the chopped down trees, though there is a license for it.

I wonder, what would you do if you had all this sick lumber? Could you use it for hugelkultur? Could you use it for soil remediation somehow?

Being in an urban environment in one of hte most densely populated places in the world, and working micro-scale permaculture on a community plot with heavily polluted soils, I am very much a beginner when it comes to wood.

Thanks!

If these are giant beautiful trees and aren't rotting in the center, I would make furniture and tongue & groove floorboards with some of the lumber. Like massive live edge table tops several inches thick with the trunks. Sky's the limit really. Those trees have a ton of potential. I personally like the furniture idea, as it's useful, practical, and can be enjoyed for generations. Chestnut is beautiful wood. It could be used for hugelkulture, and I'm all for the hugels, but so can most any other wood. Chestnut is something special.

The furniture idea is good.  If it isn't a possibility for you for whatever reason, I use diseased trees that die on my land for biochar.

Thank you James and Todd!

Those are great ideas. Because I don't have 'land' as such, I was thinking more of things I could suggest to the city council to use the wood productively. Somebody else suggested woodchips, which is great but also not honouring the chestnut as 'special', as we you say. I will contact the city council and see what they're doing with it.

If the disease can be spread by woodchips, then that's not the best choice.

If their size is large enough then furniture is a good choice, if not then mushroom logs is a great choice since the hyphae of the fungi will most likely take care of the disease organism by eating it.
Fungi are one of natures clean up organisms and that is why you can find them active in diseased trees in nature.

Wood chips would tend to spread the disease if used as mulch or pathways.

These would also make good fire logs.

Redhawk