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wood Archives - The Year of Mud

Apr 03
Love0

Osage orange garden gate

By Design

gardengate

I am constantly amazed by osage orange. April and I recently built a new fence around the garden in front of the house, and we dug up old osage orange fence posts from derelict fence lines here at Dancing Rabbit. We pulled them out from being buried three feet underground, and reused them for our own fence. These posts seem to be nearly indestructible – osange orange is the most rot-resistant wood native to North America. Fence posts can last something crazy like 60 or more years without deteriorating… unreal! Anyway, this garden gate is made mostly from osage orange, too. It’s kinda funky. I like it.

Osage orange… we love you!

Sep 23
Love0

Secondary rafters for reciprocal roof going up

By Reciprocal Roof

Ok, I’m still waiting on receiving some of the many photos that were taken during the reciprocal roof-raising the other day, so I’ll wait on the ultimate rundown of the details of that day and the frame itself.

Though I will say that things are now progressing again. I am using the original poles as secondary rafters, one between each main pair. That means I will have a total of 28 trees sitting on my cob walls! Yikes.

That makes me wonder how much wood goes into a traditional gable roof. Granted these are very small trees, and you would hardly get but a couple of 2x4s from each were they to be milled, but still…. 28 trees sounds like a heck of a lot wood. It’s weird to translate pole wood to milled lumber construction.

Also, I want to say I am now a big fan of black locust. It is an incredibly hard wood and very rot-resitant. It is something of a “weed tree” (farmers usually like to get rid of it), and it grows quickly and easily. The bark is very thick but incredibly easy to peel off, and because black locust oftentimes has few knots, the peeling is just that much easier, too. Black locust is solid. Also, it smells almost like green beans when you strip the bark.