Speaker 1: Bien montoma got boga o the hearten yir, the holla,
Speaker 1: the hayman a he call ah ersuen as lance la
Speaker 1: Dani detained, Nudovshu will kill Nagatarhu la hula schomperoids on
Speaker 1: udos ors, lance is phaser lad Gun's throw Tasha Tapa
Speaker 1: seraanashka august navad is FuGO more tyri hi a punk
Speaker 1: ie is called RelA on tudoros or raslanza.
Speaker 2: If we realed this Naharin, Oh hey, it's the apple
Speaker 2: peels that your roommate was going to compost, but you
Speaker 2: ate them because refuge Ali Ward back with an anniversary
Speaker 2: episode of Ologies. We are officially two hundred and eighty
Speaker 2: three episodes in and as of late September, we are five.
Speaker 2: We're five years old, and I was thinking five is
Speaker 2: a big year. I should do something. I should make
Speaker 2: an anniversary clip episode. But then I googled customary anniversary
Speaker 2: gifts and I realized that five year gifts are wood.
Speaker 2: So let's do a wood episode, shall we. Let's lumber
Speaker 2: up and celebrate with a fresh new app with my
Speaker 2: favorite sawmill in the world. I have one, and thank
Speaker 2: you to everyone who has supported the show via patreon
Speaker 2: dot com slash ologies, where you can join for about
Speaker 2: twenty five cents an episode and submit questions. Thank you
Speaker 2: to everyone who makes sure you're subscribed so you get
Speaker 2: new episodes, and everyone who rates and leaves reviews. I
Speaker 2: read every single one, including this one from airbar Styles,
Speaker 2: who just wrote I've been a fan for so long
Speaker 2: but finally got myself to open this app and write
Speaker 2: a review. This podcast is one of life's simple pleasures.
Speaker 2: Thanks Internet Dad, You're welcome, kiddo. This week Silology would
Speaker 2: so Zilology is a branch of dendrology, and it deals
Speaker 2: with the structure of wood. It comes from a Greek
Speaker 2: word zylon, which means wood cut and ready for use,
Speaker 2: or firewood or timber, or it means planks or beams.
Speaker 2: So Zilology lumber. Y'all, and I met this ologist in
Speaker 2: the summer of twenty nineteen. It was a dry, dusty
Speaker 2: July day, right after I moved to a house after
Speaker 2: living in a studio apartment for a decade. But I
Speaker 2: needed a kitchen table and Jarret and I wanted to
Speaker 2: make some kind of like live edge table, and I
Speaker 2: heard about Angel City Lumber, which sources its wood from
Speaker 2: downed urban trees. And it's in the middle of this
Speaker 2: industrial district in downtown LA. It's a sawmill and lumber
Speaker 2: storage facility. It's this big, cavernous retail warehouse, just neatly
Speaker 2: stacked with these thick planks and stumps and slabs. Each
Speaker 2: one is labeled with a type of tree and the
Speaker 2: neighborhood that it fell or was cut from. And so
Speaker 2: we ended up buying a live or natural edged three
Speaker 2: inch thick samil ash slab from Covina, and Jarrett standed
Speaker 2: and finished it as our dining room table. So I
Speaker 2: appreciate their mission every day, as do a bunch of
Speaker 2: local furniture builders and carpenters and designers and woodworkers. And
Speaker 2: I emailed the founder and I asked if he would
Speaker 2: answer a bunch of lumber questions. And I headed there
Speaker 2: last Saturday afternoon, just after they closed to the public
Speaker 2: for the day. I was toting my little audio kit
Speaker 2: wherever it's good place, I just want to like sniff everything.
Speaker 2: It smells so good in here. We sat in the
Speaker 2: office and we talked about everything from sawdust to tree diseases.
Speaker 2: Two by four's salvaged lumber kiln drying, westward expansion, indigenous
Speaker 2: forest management, cedar with walnut burls, bog logs, grain patterns,
Speaker 2: and more. So, get ready to be acquainted with timber
Speaker 2: with co founder of Angel City lumber ziologist Jeff Perry.
Speaker 2: Jeff Perry, he him got it. Yeah, Now I've known
Speaker 2: you for a couple of years. I came in to
Speaker 2: get a slab, a table slab, fell in love with
Speaker 2: right for a fifth anniversary for wood. I was like,
Speaker 2: ha ha, this is perfect.
Speaker 3: I love it. I mean, anyone that wants to talk wood,
Speaker 3: they have my attention.
Speaker 2: Would you call yourself a lumberjack? Who gets to call
Speaker 2: themselves a lumberjack?
Speaker 3: I think someone who is in a forest of some kind,
Speaker 3: maybe an urban forest, felling trees is a lumberjack. And
Speaker 3: I don't know if we can classify ourselves as that
Speaker 3: because we're not felling trees. We're essentially hauling trees that
Speaker 3: have fallen or are being taken down, or are being
Speaker 3: taken down because of the disease, or they're being taken
Speaker 3: down because of development, parish the thought, or like whatever reason.
Speaker 3: But we're not out there with the chainsaw. As much
Speaker 3: as I think it's romantic. I can't really call our
Speaker 3: operation lumberjacks.
Speaker 2: You're not Paul bunyaning out there in a flannel. Yeah.
Speaker 3: No. Not typically an angel city.
Speaker 2: That's obviously Los Angeles. When people think of Los Angeles,
Speaker 2: I feel like they don't think of trees. Are you
Speaker 2: from here originally?
Speaker 3: I'm not from here, originally from the Boston area. Hm.
Speaker 3: I'm from Reading, Massachusetts, which is north of Boston. I
Speaker 3: moved here twenty years ago. Actually, next two weeks, it'll
Speaker 3: be twenty years.
Speaker 4: Hey.
Speaker 2: The customary gift for a twentieth anniversary is porcelain dishware,
Speaker 2: which I did not come prepared with. But in the
Speaker 2: last two decades Jeff learned a lot about carpentry, furniture fabrication,
Speaker 2: and he built an appreciation for different types of would.
Speaker 3: So as a maker, kind of self taught for the
Speaker 3: most part, not necessarily a great one, but a maker.
Speaker 3: I had a couple of kids. I was in business
Speaker 3: for myself. My son was a year and a half, no,
Speaker 3: two and a half, and we were on a hike
Speaker 3: in Altadena with our dog and I saw this tree
Speaker 3: come down in a storm. I didn't see the tree fall,
Speaker 3: but I saw it downed and we were walking by it,
Speaker 3: and as I tell the story, I thought I was
Speaker 3: a genius. I was. I thought I was the only
Speaker 3: one to ever think like this was just like, I'm
Speaker 3: going to build a line of furniture from this oak.
Speaker 3: From this tree. It was a huge, co dominant live
Speaker 3: oak that kind of splayed, you know, in the storm.
Speaker 3: And I was like, this is it. So I went
Speaker 3: to the ranger and I asked, you know, can I
Speaker 3: take this tree that has fallen? And he was like, no,
Speaker 3: that's what you can't. It's a county park, Like, you
Speaker 3: can't do that. So he was very nice, and to
Speaker 3: his credit, he was very patient with me. But I
Speaker 3: went back a week later and I saw that the
Speaker 3: tree had been To their credit, most of it was
Speaker 3: still left there to decompose, but there were still parts
Speaker 3: of it in the pathway that were bucked up.
Speaker 2: Bucked up side note means cutting into logs, just chunking
Speaker 2: it up.
Speaker 3: And I just like had this moment of like I
Speaker 3: just I literally at that time, had just paid eleven
Speaker 3: dollars a board foot for oak from Illinois for this commission,
Speaker 3: and I see this oak come down and it is
Speaker 3: getting thrown away. Essentially it's being mulched. So then I
Speaker 3: just kind of went down this rabbit hole like what
Speaker 3: do you mean we just melted? What do you mean?
Speaker 3: What do you mean? What do you mean? And then
Speaker 3: I started doing some research and talking to people and
Speaker 3: found out that a lot of like recycling coordinators around
Speaker 3: the county or like, yeah, we mulch it. And then
Speaker 3: I was like, no, this is unacceptable. So then it
Speaker 3: started figuring out ways to you know, I would call
Speaker 3: tree services first and foremost. Now they love trees, you know,
Speaker 3: and they're they it just guts them when they have
Speaker 3: to like see a tree come down and then ship
Speaker 3: it and then buck it up into these enormous majestic
Speaker 3: tree So I would call them and say like, hey, look,
Speaker 3: if I had a truck and I could come by
Speaker 3: and take a tree that you guys are felling, They're like, yeah,
Speaker 3: when can you? Like can you when can you be here?
Speaker 3: Really Like well, I don't have a truck yet, and
Speaker 3: they're like all right, well, just like let's go. And
Speaker 3: then I started calling some of the design community because
Speaker 3: I'd worked with some designers and stuff like that as
Speaker 3: a maker. I was like, you know, if you if
Speaker 3: we had locally sourced lumber, would would that be something
Speaker 3: that you'd be interested in? They're like, yes, we've been
Speaker 3: wanting to have this kind of supply chain like that.
Speaker 2: So it's like, okay, he found an investor via a
Speaker 2: carpenter and woodworker lauras On, and that is how the
Speaker 2: afterlife for downed trees, the heaven that is Angel City
Speaker 2: Lumber came to be. But wait, let's buck up, because
Speaker 2: there is so mulch to cover. When something gets mulched,
Speaker 2: what happens to it? Like, is there any kind of argument, like,
Speaker 2: but we need the mulch, or does that mulch go
Speaker 2: into a landfill with dirty diapers and banana peels?
Speaker 3: That's oh man, this is such a good question, so
Speaker 3: on so many levels. I'm also going to try and
Speaker 3: keep it brief. But so, mulch in and of itself
Speaker 3: is great. It does a lot of great things. It
Speaker 3: retains moisture, right, it suppresses weeds. The only thing is
Speaker 3: that there's a there's a couple of things when a
Speaker 3: tree dies. Right. First of all, we have we have,
Speaker 3: i think culturally an aversion to death period. So I'm
Speaker 3: going to put a pin in that.
Speaker 5: Okay, But but what happens is is we just what
Speaker 5: we panic and it's a nuisance, and it's a liability,
Speaker 5: and it's cya, and we got to get rid of
Speaker 5: this tree that has fallen.
Speaker 2: I thought cya was a municipal term, but I looked
Speaker 2: it up afterward and I think you just meant cover
Speaker 2: your ass.
Speaker 3: So the knee jerk reaction is get it out, cut
Speaker 3: it up, melch it, get it, get it away, right,
Speaker 3: So things like twigs leaves, some element of branches and limbs,
Speaker 3: sure like melch, great, you know we can use that.
Speaker 3: We can use every more soliba tree. When you have
Speaker 3: a four inch diameter eighty five year olds, you know,
Speaker 3: American elm, please don't mulch the trunk or the larger branches.
Speaker 3: You know, it's just like it's to me, it's a
Speaker 3: little sacrilege. It's not a little sacrilege. It's just kind
Speaker 3: of it just is indicative of the disconnect we have
Speaker 3: culturally as humans with trees, at least in the West.
Speaker 3: So mulch, let's talk about it. What happens now is
Speaker 3: every municipality I know in this area is required to
Speaker 3: not throw away trees. They're not allowed to dispose in
Speaker 3: a landfill, nor do they want to. These are all
Speaker 3: good people, so they're like great. I mean, they used
Speaker 3: to be able to bury trees, like like bucked up logs.
Speaker 3: They used to excavate and bury them, and you know
Speaker 3: they would decompose, but obviously with carbon emitting and methane
Speaker 3: therefore it's just like no. So they put a stop
Speaker 3: to that. So they melch. They melch everything much much mulch.
Speaker 3: But now mulch it doesn't go in the landfill. Typically
Speaker 3: it gets utile lies back into the community, either on
Speaker 3: the sides of freeways or public tree wells. Or they
Speaker 3: also have free malt drops for people in the community,
Speaker 3: like if you've ever been in like Griffith Park, or
Speaker 3: they have like a at the composting site, they have
Speaker 3: like a free mulch pile. I didn't know that your
Speaker 3: gardening and you're like, hey, oh, good to know I
Speaker 3: need mulch.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think I purchased mault recently. Figure out the
Speaker 2: hell I do that?
Speaker 4: Who knew?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, So free.
Speaker 2: Motes much in general, because wood and lumber is something
Speaker 2: that's so needed and it's such a precious resource that
Speaker 2: if we have something that is potentially lumber. Better to
Speaker 2: use the thing that's got to get removed anyway, then
Speaker 2: go fell a healthy tree.
Speaker 3: Right agreed. When people come here, I love to see
Speaker 3: their face when they go to the log deck and
Speaker 3: they see the logs come in, especially when it was
Speaker 3: their tree that was standing there a day or two before.
Speaker 3: And they come by the log deck and it's like,
Speaker 3: oh my god, look at all these trees. They're saying,
Speaker 3: look at these trees. Right yeah. Then they see the
Speaker 3: process of the logs coming from the log deck over
Speaker 3: to the milling area. Then they see it from the
Speaker 3: milling area go into the kilns, and then from the
Speaker 3: kilns go to millworks, and then from millworks go to
Speaker 3: either the retail shop or to a project, and it paints.
Speaker 3: Obviously everyone knows who comes from trees, but they don't
Speaker 3: think about it. They think wood shows up on a flatbed. Yeah,
Speaker 3: you know. Yeah, And as I often say, it's like
Speaker 3: the no one looks at the chicken nugget and thinks
Speaker 3: of a chicken, you know. So it's the disconnect is
Speaker 3: so real, and it's really cool to see people awake
Speaker 3: to it here. So I bring that up because we
Speaker 3: don't think of our trees as living beings. Typically, there's
Speaker 3: very little honor involved in the efficiency of mulching in
Speaker 3: my opinion. So again it's not to say the mulching
Speaker 3: is bad. Melting is great, but if it's a byproduct
Speaker 3: to a larger thing, then I think it's a lot.
Speaker 2: More viable, which is why Angel City has a very
Speaker 2: hyper local model. Part of their mission statement says that
Speaker 2: the only way to shift an untenable way of harvesting
Speaker 2: commercial lumber is that every local community produces its own
Speaker 2: from its own local forest, which can be street trees
Speaker 2: that have been felled due to development or disease or
Speaker 2: from storm damage. But what about the lumber that we
Speaker 2: are used to this stack at two by fours that
Speaker 2: we pick up on maybe an ambitious Saturday morning from
Speaker 2: the box store.
Speaker 3: So commercial lumber is typically for the most part, you know,
Speaker 3: especially for construction gay lumber. There are forests designated forests
Speaker 3: now in Western culture that are secession planted, so they
Speaker 3: are planted essentially usually for fifteen or twenty years, let
Speaker 3: to grow, and then after the fifteen twenty years they
Speaker 3: are harvested. Those trees typically because of demand, and it's
Speaker 3: the same forests the world over, but because of demand,
Speaker 3: they are planted harvested secession planted, meaning like once that
Speaker 3: harvest is gone, they're going back and they're receding, they're
Speaker 3: turning the soil. They're totally new trees. They are typically
Speaker 3: for like free to grow. Secession planting means that you're
Speaker 3: getting rid of all the underbrush. They don't want those
Speaker 3: trees to compete for any resources. They want them to
Speaker 3: grow fat and straight and just pump out boards. So
Speaker 3: that's kind of where we're at with lumber, and that's
Speaker 3: how that's why we think of boards showing up on
Speaker 3: a flatbed, but not as a tree. So then you
Speaker 3: live in an urban community or even a rural one
Speaker 3: and trees come down, and it's like, oh man, everyone's
Speaker 3: so gutted about this tree. That is that you know,
Speaker 3: this tree that was standing was such a vital part
Speaker 3: of their life, Like maybe it was there a tree
Speaker 3: in their front yard. Maybe their kids climbed on it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: maybe they wept under it under sad times or whatever
Speaker 3: it is. There's a tie, right, I love that tree.
Speaker 3: But as soon as the tree comes down, it then
Speaker 3: becomes a nuisance. Not necessarily if it's a tree that
Speaker 3: you're tied to. But my point is when that tree
Speaker 3: comes down and it's your tree and you are tied
Speaker 3: to it, you have a connection to it. So then
Speaker 3: when you are saying, look, we have a lot of
Speaker 3: people here that you know, have a tree come down there, like,
Speaker 3: we just want you to make something from it. Yeah,
Speaker 3: especially for me, like please make me something of my tree.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But there's a deep connection to that tree. So if
Speaker 3: people were connected to all trees like they are connected
Speaker 3: to that particular tree, then I think we would be
Speaker 3: in a much different headspace and heart space than we
Speaker 3: currently are. And not just trees, but it would be
Speaker 3: for food. You know, it's the same thing like farmer
Speaker 3: table or you know, ethically sourcing meat, right, I mean,
Speaker 3: it's all different things. When you have an animal that
Speaker 3: you've grown and have a relationship with, and it's like
Speaker 3: a whole different Daniel Schmockenberger did this really cool talk
Speaker 3: essentially on how the plow was kind of the beginning
Speaker 3: of like when agriculture. The agriculture revolution was like Okay,
Speaker 3: now we have a plow that we need to have
Speaker 3: ox run to make sure that we're having enough grain
Speaker 3: planted for our civilization. But before that, there was an animism.
Speaker 3: Everything had a spirit, everything was a soul and everything.
Speaker 3: But that switch from okay, but I really need you
Speaker 3: to like I really need you to make this this crop.
Speaker 3: So like, yeah, let's go start yoking the ox, start
Speaker 3: whipping the ox, start binding the horns of the ox.
Speaker 3: You know, it's just changes the relationship. And I think
Speaker 3: that the like where we're at now currently is like
Speaker 3: a holdover from that kind of mentality of yeah, it's true,
Speaker 3: we need some boards. Let's go. Let's go, let's go,
Speaker 3: let's go. So anyway, I think by like our whole
Speaker 3: thing is like reconnecting to an animism, if you will.
Speaker 3: That is, you know, trying to really take a look
Speaker 3: at the trees in our community. In the urban forest.
Speaker 3: You walk by them all the time, you drive by
Speaker 3: them all the time, You get shade, You get your
Speaker 3: kids under them in the summer, in the la summer,
Speaker 3: under them, so they protect your kids. Get acquainted with
Speaker 3: a tree, you know, talk to a tree, be with
Speaker 3: a tree, touch a tree, think about a tree, look
Speaker 3: in the canopy. And then when the process of garnering
Speaker 3: a gift such as wood from that tree, you think
Speaker 3: about it differently, and I think that's the big shift
Speaker 3: that needs to happen with lumber.
Speaker 2: Did you read The Giving Tree as a child and
Speaker 2: saw your face off? Because that was like I was
Speaker 2: ready to walk into the ocean in like fourth grade.
Speaker 2: I was like, Oh, I mean, but it's not far off.
Speaker 3: It's not it's not fair spot. And that's why it's
Speaker 3: a killer because we know, oh, it's right on the money.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Just a side note. So this children's book was
Speaker 2: initially rejected by a bunch of publishers until it finally
Speaker 2: was released in nineteen sixty four, and it features the
Speaker 2: relationship between a boy and an apple tree, and as
Speaker 2: a kid, he climbs the branches and then later sells
Speaker 2: its apples, cuts limbs to build a house and a boat.
Speaker 2: Does he need a boat, and finally reduces this apple
Speaker 2: tree to a stump. Reading it for me feels like
Speaker 2: your grandpa spent his last seven dollars on your birthday
Speaker 2: present and at the same moment you got kicked in
Speaker 2: the stomach by a donkey. This book hurts me so much. Trees,
Speaker 2: I'm so sorry. So what happens to neighborhood trees that
Speaker 2: have come down anyway, maybe taken in their prime by
Speaker 2: condo development or a neighbor's fence or a weavil. Did
Speaker 2: you find it was difficult to get your hands on
Speaker 2: these trees that were going to be mulched, or did
Speaker 2: you find more and more there were people who were saying, well,
Speaker 2: I have to take down the sycamore. Part of it fell,
Speaker 2: so can you come take it?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so, believe it or not, it was relatively easy
Speaker 3: to find people that were willing to give us tree logs.
Speaker 3: It was relatively hard to get them to understand, hey,
Speaker 3: we needed a certain length, we needed a certain diameter.
Speaker 3: We'd end up with a lot of brush or small
Speaker 3: diameter or tiny short lengths. We're like, awesome, thank you
Speaker 3: so much. I don't know how to make wood from this.
Speaker 3: But for the most part, people were super jazzed about
Speaker 3: giving tree logs to us as far as the process went.
Speaker 3: Charles Durosum, my partner at the time, he researched and
Speaker 3: found this method of parbuckling, which is essentially pulling up
Speaker 3: next to a log with a trailer and on steel
Speaker 3: ramps and a winch, rolling a log up onto a
Speaker 3: trailer deck. So that's how we did it for the
Speaker 3: first few years. Now cranes are involved, which is a
Speaker 3: lot easier most of the time. But anyway, the sourcing
Speaker 3: was for the size we were starting out was actually
Speaker 3: relatively easy, luckily.
Speaker 2: So I didn't know until I came here that you
Speaker 2: can't just take a big log and cut it into
Speaker 2: big pancakes and say we're good to go. Here. There's
Speaker 2: a drying that has to happen. You've got to store
Speaker 2: it for a while. How does something go from a
Speaker 2: timber crash to a table.
Speaker 3: Boy, that's a great question. How much time we get
Speaker 3: on syderm. I'll make this kind of I'll make this
Speaker 3: as like the most abridged version possible. But once you
Speaker 3: have a viable sawlog as they call them, if you're
Speaker 3: going to commoditize it, a tree that has produced a
Speaker 3: section of itself, and you put it on a mill,
Speaker 3: typically on its side, there's typically three cuts, kind of
Speaker 3: like if you were to think of it like a butcher.
Speaker 3: So there are planes on boards, there are are rift
Speaker 3: so on boards, and there are quarters on boards. Okay,
Speaker 3: so essentially if you're looking at the end of a board,
Speaker 3: you're looking at the end grain. So the end grain
Speaker 3: of the board is going to basically show the rings
Speaker 3: of the tree, the growth rings of the tree. So
Speaker 3: as you're looking at it, terrible example, terrible example, as
Speaker 3: you're looking at it, this is better.
Speaker 2: Excuse me, good thing that you got wood samples around.
Speaker 3: Turns out this is one thing I got.
Speaker 2: Okay, he grabbed some finished, perfectly angular planks and the
Speaker 2: first one was plane Song.
Speaker 3: You can see the growthings traveling mark. This is a lepopine.
Speaker 3: It's a lot easier to see the growth rings on
Speaker 3: conifers typically, So these are traveling with the edge right.
Speaker 3: You can see they're almost lateral on the edge.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're almost like a horizontal.
Speaker 3: Stripes sort of thank you exactly.
Speaker 2: Again, that was plane Song, which is the most efficient
Speaker 2: use of the whole log, and it's the most affordable cut,
Speaker 2: and it has commonly what's called cathedral grain, So imagine
Speaker 2: zebra stripes kind of in the shape of pope hats
Speaker 2: that are nested in each other. That's cathedral grain. But
Speaker 2: a different cut of wood is rifts on planks cut
Speaker 2: from logs kind of an a radial pattern from the center.
Speaker 3: Riftsan is this board here where the growth rings are
Speaker 3: almost at a forty five degree angle right to the face,
Speaker 3: and this one being quartersan. These are vertical and perpendicular
Speaker 3: to the face.
Speaker 1: Hah.
Speaker 3: Quartersan is typically everyone's like Cortison Cortison or rifts on.
Speaker 3: It's fancy the grain pattern, you get a little more figure,
Speaker 3: but as far as building goes, plans on is simply
Speaker 3: just as good. They're just different grain patterns. So in
Speaker 3: choosing how you're going to cut a board also plays
Speaker 3: into the next step, which is drying. So correct you
Speaker 3: cut boards and you're like, okay, I got ad off
Speaker 3: the mill, let's build something, and you're like, no, that's
Speaker 3: actually not how it works. If you build with wet material,
Speaker 3: if you're joining boards and stuff like that, they are
Speaker 3: going to off gas water as they do over time slowly,
Speaker 3: and as they off gas, they're gonna warp. So a
Speaker 3: tree is typically, depending on the species, anywhere between sixty
Speaker 3: five to seventy percent water, just like some other creatures
Speaker 3: that we're familiar with, like me. And the cellular structure
Speaker 3: of wood, there's basically two kinds of water. There's free
Speaker 3: water and there's bound water. Okay, then the cellular structure
Speaker 3: of the wood, so free water is the water that
Speaker 3: is within the cell.
Speaker 2: Walls, so it's just nestled within the cell. Imagine free
Speaker 2: water kind of mingling around a room. But the bound
Speaker 2: water is trapped in the walls itself. So of course
Speaker 2: the water roaming the cell, not within the wall, is
Speaker 2: faster to depart.
Speaker 3: That evaporates relatively quick. So if we cut these boards,
Speaker 3: we put them on little sticks, within a few months,
Speaker 3: all that free water is going to evaporate from the wood. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's cool. Three months, not that long. However, the bound water,
Speaker 3: which is the water trapped in the cell walls, is
Speaker 3: way slower to come out, way slower. They say. Typically
Speaker 3: it takes a year per inch thickness of wood to
Speaker 3: air dry. Oh wow, So and that's the bound water.
Speaker 3: M hmm. That's also typically like a northeast upper Midwest.
Speaker 3: That's kind of a trope out here. It's not that way.
Speaker 3: It's faster because it's drier and it's more arid. But anyway,
Speaker 3: that's the general rule. So if your air drying wood,
Speaker 3: you have to wait a long time before you can
Speaker 3: build with it. There is now kiln drying technology where
Speaker 3: you can put it into a dry kiln to speed
Speaker 3: up the process. Just because you speed up the process
Speaker 3: doesn't mean you can do it haphazardly. It is an
Speaker 3: exact It's like baking. You can mess up would really
Speaker 3: easy in a kiln, But if you play your cards right,
Speaker 3: it speeds up the process, maintains the stability to the wood.
Speaker 3: Then you can build with it. But building with it,
Speaker 3: as a lot of people know, is also a thing
Speaker 3: you have to Then now you have a rough so.
Speaker 2: On board, not like the picture perfect finished boards he's holding,
Speaker 2: which have had kind of a lumber yard glow up.
Speaker 3: These have been surfaced and planed and straight and easy.
Speaker 2: Those look on points.
Speaker 3: On point, they come off the mill and out of
Speaker 3: the kiln, they look like ooh, like what what do
Speaker 3: I do? It's like rough and warped and all these things.
Speaker 3: So you have to make it into to surface it
Speaker 3: through various machines to dress it so you can make
Speaker 3: it buildable.
Speaker 2: So it's plumb. Everything's plumb, as they say, right, Yeah.
Speaker 2: I love watching YouTube videos where people are doing renovations
Speaker 2: and they shit talk how nothing's plumbed. I'm like, probably
Speaker 2: if I built something, nothing would be plunged.
Speaker 3: It's always the other person's work.
Speaker 2: Somebody else.
Speaker 3: Nothing's plumb. Nothing's plumbing this place.
Speaker 4: Next I install stuff, it's every sixteen inches or so,
Speaker 4: making sure they're plumb or vertical.
Speaker 2: And you know, when it comes to the different kinds
Speaker 2: of trees that are in urban environments, let's say versus rural,
Speaker 2: is it so different in let's say La or San
Speaker 2: Francisco or Boston as it would be in environs just
Speaker 2: outside of it. Like, I know, we've got a lot
Speaker 2: of live oak, We've got walnut, black walnut here in
Speaker 2: southern California. We have a lot of sycamore and eucalyptus.
Speaker 2: But I don't know if those are if those are native?
Speaker 3: Yeah, no, it's these are. This is great. So, like
Speaker 3: as far as species go, yeah.
Speaker 2: Like, what do you find that what you are using
Speaker 2: as a maker is different than what you're harvesting and
Speaker 2: building from.
Speaker 3: That's a great question. Why?
Speaker 2: Thank you?
Speaker 6: So?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 6: So?
Speaker 3: Okay, So I'll answer this in two parts. The first
Speaker 3: part is what species, Like, are there any species that
Speaker 3: span kind of any urban community in our country? Let's say, yeah,
Speaker 3: there are real, tried and true urban trees that are
Speaker 3: resilient that you know, typically cities don't put a lot
Speaker 3: of money into I'm not a judgment, it's just there's
Speaker 3: no money, so they're not putting it toward the urban
Speaker 3: forestry division. So they plant trees that are resilient, they
Speaker 3: don't need much care. So London plane is like the
Speaker 3: you know that London plane is like the stereotypical urban
Speaker 3: tree that is like, man, they're beautiful, they grow, they're resilient,
Speaker 3: they have a good shade, canopy, et cetera. So whether
Speaker 3: you're in New York, San Francisco, wherever la you'll you'll
Speaker 3: find a London plane. So there are species like that.
Speaker 3: But I will say it is very easy to see
Speaker 3: by the age of the trees of an area, which
Speaker 3: trees were given twenty or ten or twenty years like
Speaker 3: the go to urban trees.
Speaker 2: They're like it was like Carab, very like totally see
Speaker 2: the Carabology episode, which is, yes, a whole episode dedicated
Speaker 2: to Carab trees and the not chocolate that they produce,
Speaker 2: and I'll link that in the show notes. But yes,
Speaker 2: you probably haven't seen a lot of this really beautiful
Speaker 2: russet hearted Carab wood around, which sucks because it's beautiful
Speaker 2: and there are thirty year old carab trees getting cut
Speaker 2: down all the time on suburban streets.
Speaker 3: We're using a lot of species that aren't typically on
Speaker 3: the commercial market because they have been deemed culturally as
Speaker 3: those aren't wood trees. Ah, those are canopy trees. Those
Speaker 3: are ornamental trees, they're resilient whatever, but they're not wood trees. Right.
Speaker 3: It's interesting because most of those resilient trees that are
Speaker 3: getting planted deservant trees were somewhere, somehow, at some time,
Speaker 3: a tree that civilizations built themselves on. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 3: so no, it's not a cherry log from New York State,
Speaker 3: but a Canary Island pine. Everyone's like, what is it?
Speaker 3: I don't know what that is. And then you go
Speaker 3: on the street and you're like, that's a Canary alan pine.
Speaker 3: That's a Canary Island pine, and that's a canar Aalian pine.
Speaker 3: They're like, oh yeah, oh those yes, those, So I'll
Speaker 3: give you example. So this tree is so resinous, it's
Speaker 3: just a natural resin. People call it sap, but it's
Speaker 3: not actually sap. That's more of a deciduous thing. But
Speaker 3: these conifers have this pitch, like a really thick, gooey
Speaker 3: pitch and it just it just oozes out of this wood.
Speaker 3: So everyone's like, oh God, and like I'm not building
Speaker 3: furniture and this I'm doing things. Well, that's fine. You
Speaker 3: don't have to build a windsor chair out of canary
Speaker 3: and pine. However, the tree is incredible and that natural
Speaker 3: resin in it. Why use pressure treated wood? Why pump
Speaker 3: all these chemicals into a piece of lumber so that
Speaker 3: when you're building your deck it's ground contact and doesn't
Speaker 3: deteriorate when nature has already made a species of wood
Speaker 3: that is pumped full of resin, natural resin that it
Speaker 3: stands up to years of like earth contact and moisture,
Speaker 3: you know what I mean. It's like we're not thinking
Speaker 3: outside the box. And now we're like, no, guys use
Speaker 3: this for groundtack, lumber, ground contact. So usually especially designers,
Speaker 3: they come here and they're like, you gotta tell me
Speaker 3: about these species. I don't know anything about these species.
Speaker 3: And then we say, okay, So here's some best use
Speaker 3: cases for eucalyptus, or here's some best case uses for
Speaker 3: California sycamore or coast live oak, real fast coast live oak.
Speaker 3: There's an elle based native California sycamore is also a
Speaker 3: elle based in Native the right Perian tree, so it's
Speaker 3: along river beds.
Speaker 2: Ah. I didn't realize sycamore was Native.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was in Griffith Park as it trails once oh yeah,
Speaker 2: and all of a sudden heard a crack, it a
Speaker 2: boom and a sycamore. Have a sycamore just split intwo
Speaker 2: out of nowhere on a sunny Sunday afternoon. It was
Speaker 2: quite a thing to see. Everyone was fine, but I
Speaker 2: was like, oh, wow, that was I've never seen a
Speaker 2: tree fall in the park.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 2: But it did make us sound. But I was like,
Speaker 2: I wondered, I wonder what they're going to do with
Speaker 2: that now, Like who comes and you know they put
Speaker 2: some caution tape up, but I don't know. I wonder
Speaker 2: if that one ended up here.
Speaker 3: It could have.
Speaker 2: But when it comes to the model that you've done here,
Speaker 2: does this happen in other places in the country?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, for sure, we are. We are definitely not
Speaker 3: the only like people doing this at all. They're all
Speaker 3: great people. But there's like New York City slab, there's
Speaker 3: wood from the Hood in Minneapolis, Epilogue, LLC. And Oregon
Speaker 3: Bay Area or Redwood and in the Bay Area there's
Speaker 3: harvest lumber. I got the shirt on right here in Austin, Texas. Gosh,
Speaker 3: there's a lot. There's a lot.
Speaker 2: Jeff emailed me later with a list of folks that
Speaker 2: he wished she mentioned, writing, there are a slew of
Speaker 2: people across the country and continent in world who utilize
Speaker 2: urban trees as lumber currently. And there are a few
Speaker 2: others right here in southern California that he says he
Speaker 2: would be remiss not to mention, like San Diego Urban Timber,
Speaker 2: Lumber Cycle in San Diego, saw in Los Angeles, and
Speaker 2: Straight Tree Revival in Anaheim. And I'll list all of
Speaker 2: those on my website so you can just gouck it
Speaker 2: all of their pretty planks, knowing that such gorgeous timber
Speaker 2: was saved from maybe just decomposing in a forgotten mulch mountain.
Speaker 2: What about different woods for different applications? I am not
Speaker 2: a carpentryst by any manner of speaking. What kind of
Speaker 2: wood is good for floors? People are making a lot
Speaker 2: of things out of palettes from behind dumpsters. What are
Speaker 2: different types of wood best suited for?
Speaker 3: So good? Okay, boy, that's it. It's kind of a
Speaker 3: rap sheet. I'll speak as generally as I can. Basically
Speaker 3: for flooring, since you brought up flooring, we use typically
Speaker 3: various species of eucalyptus and coast live oak. Those are
Speaker 3: our two kind of go tos. Why because they're very
Speaker 3: hard and dense. Eucalyptus is also very close grain. It
Speaker 3: can hold up to high foot traffic. They're also not
Speaker 3: necessarily the most stable woods as boards. Solid wood is
Speaker 3: going to be roughly five eighths to three quarter in thickness,
Speaker 3: no problem. Or even if you're making an engineered like
Speaker 3: a ware layer, which is roughly four millimeters thick, no problem.
Speaker 3: So they're perfect for that. And again the durability is great.
Speaker 3: So those two, those are species that typically on the
Speaker 3: commercial market people are like what am I gonna do
Speaker 3: with this? But like they are perfect. I mean these
Speaker 3: these are pointing to the floor because these are gorgeous.
Speaker 2: A eucalyptus floor. Who knew, Jeff.
Speaker 3: Takes a lot of foot traffic in here. But anyway,
Speaker 3: so that's one. We have a lot of makers and
Speaker 3: furniture makers that come in here. There are certain species
Speaker 3: that are really great for joinery and making furniture. Shamel
Speaker 3: ash like your table yep is a perfect one. Are
Speaker 3: California sycamore. The native is also a really big fan
Speaker 3: favorite for that. We have a lot of American elm,
Speaker 3: Chinese elm, Siberian elm. Those are fantastic. The native. There's
Speaker 3: a native black walnut that is also great. So there's
Speaker 3: that's a whole other like a it's like basically like
Speaker 3: a deciduous, machineable stable species. Those are great for making.
Speaker 3: We use a ton of pine, which you know, everyone
Speaker 3: has this preconceived notion about pine. They're usually thinking about
Speaker 3: softer like Eastern white pines. Again, this is like a
Speaker 3: cultural holdover, by the way, I love Eastern white pine.
Speaker 3: But anyway, the pines that we get here are again
Speaker 3: are really robust trees from other parts of the world.
Speaker 3: So a Leppo pine is a Syrian and Lemonese you know,
Speaker 3: syndemic to those areas super dense, especially for a pine,
Speaker 3: like it's a hard wood. It's not a hardwood, but
Speaker 3: it is a hard wood. The same with Italian stone pine.
Speaker 3: On final, as I said earlier, we use those for
Speaker 3: a lot of big, chunky landscape timbers. Okay, so we
Speaker 3: have a lot of Terramotal Landscape represent They love calling
Speaker 3: those fixtures chunks as deemed by a Tarramoto.
Speaker 2: Tarramoto Landscape And my friend David Newsom at wild Yards
Speaker 2: Project dot org also do a lot of beautiful native
Speaker 2: landscapes and they use a lot of reclaimed materials, And
Speaker 2: I'll link them on my site because their handiwork has
Speaker 2: personally transformed my hill in my backyard of invasive weeds
Speaker 2: into what's now a pollinator habitat and a hub for critters.
Speaker 2: But back to inside and what was under our feet?
Speaker 2: What is hardwood by the way, because you said they're hardwood,
Speaker 2: but not hardwood, that's.
Speaker 3: A great question. So hardwoods hardwood as in one word,
Speaker 3: hardwood is typically a designation for a wood from a
Speaker 3: deciduous tree. Oh okay, and softwood is typically a denomination
Speaker 3: for a conifer.
Speaker 2: I had no idea.
Speaker 3: Typically I had no idea.
Speaker 2: So when someone says that they have hardwood floors, let's say, yep,
Speaker 2: my apartment is hardwood floors. Does that mean it's going
Speaker 2: to be a walnut and not a pine or is
Speaker 2: that just totally different?
Speaker 3: Oh okay, yeah, it could be you know, like obviously
Speaker 3: like the yeah, a walnut, like the commercial, the white
Speaker 3: oaks and the red oaks, beach maple, you know all
Speaker 3: those those are hardwoods.
Speaker 2: Haha. Does it ever pain you to see certain woods
Speaker 2: trend one year and then be like, ugh, everyone rip
Speaker 2: out your white oak floors. They're so last year? Like,
Speaker 2: does that ever just kill you?
Speaker 3: I love all wood, I love all trees, so but
Speaker 3: I get less. I get less miffed about the trending
Speaker 3: from a tree standpoint, and way more from a from
Speaker 3: a human standpoint. Yeah, like the walnut, Like every woodworker
Speaker 3: and everyone at a mill in the country is like,
Speaker 3: I know you love walnut. Yeah, it's not walnut's fault.
Speaker 3: That is beautiful and all the things, but it's just like, guys,
Speaker 3: come on, we gotta branch out. I gotta branch out. Yeah, hey, guys,
Speaker 3: it's so ingredined. Jeez, I'm gonna stop. You gonna leave
Speaker 3: it alone.
Speaker 2: But would you say that was there? Has there ever
Speaker 2: been a wood that's really surprised you that you're like,
Speaker 2: who knew this was such a good one?
Speaker 3: Can I can? I? Yes, I'm gonna go and go off.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so eucalyptus, Okay, buckle up, boy, howdy?
Speaker 3: This ties in for culturally Again, you asked what eucalyptus earlier,
Speaker 3: So eucalyptus is endemic to Australia. I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 3: backtrack for a second. People woodworkers, woodworker people are like,
Speaker 3: eucalyptus is crap. Oh that wrap, yeah, crap, crap, wood
Speaker 3: can't do anything with It's crap, unstable, scrap, cell collapse, crappy.
Speaker 3: So that has just been anyone you talk to like eucalypts, alright,
Speaker 3: well you can't you like, you know, you see people
Speaker 3: around town and that a tree comes down or eucalyptus
Speaker 3: comes down, and they know what we do and they're like, ah,
Speaker 3: well two bag is usually just right, like yeah, well
Speaker 3: actually wrong because what we have kind of really gone
Speaker 3: down the rabbit hole with is making people see that
Speaker 3: eucalyptus is fantastic. And while I know from an ecological standpoint,
Speaker 3: there's and I don't claim to be an ecologist, and
Speaker 3: I don't claim to know like all the all the
Speaker 3: ends in the outs from a flora and fauna standpoint,
Speaker 3: locally and all that it's allelopathic, meaning like there's not
Speaker 3: always opportunity for other plants to grow under its canopy
Speaker 3: and stuff like this. Everyone hates this tree, okay, except
Speaker 3: except for Koalis, except for Australians of any kind human
Speaker 3: in the more than human world in Australia love eucalypse.
Speaker 3: It's in the West we hate them and they're invasive
Speaker 3: and they're all these things. So quick, very quick, little
Speaker 3: a bridge version of how it got here.
Speaker 2: Bring it on, dude.
Speaker 3: So American settlers, mostly of the European setlar ancestry variety
Speaker 3: in their DNA wooded areas, woods right woods for energy
Speaker 3: via fire, woods for building materials as wood, wood is wood,
Speaker 3: wod wood, wood, wood right post you know, thirteen colonies
Speaker 3: or a country now and it's just harvest your pants
Speaker 3: off with wood and manifest destiny up through Iowa, which
Speaker 3: is the forest has been so decimated because of you
Speaker 3: know again moving westward. Now, this is where the US
Speaker 3: for service is emerging, and there's like talks like, hey,
Speaker 3: what are we going to do here? And there's this
Speaker 3: talk of like a like a timber famine potentially so
Speaker 3: around this time as well. Now the trans Transcontinental Railroad
Speaker 3: has got by the way. I'm just a quick little
Speaker 3: plug here. There's an author named Jared Farmer, who wrote
Speaker 3: a book called Trees and Paradise that is incredible. But
Speaker 3: again I'm giving you the very nuts and bolts version.
Speaker 3: But trans continental railroad at this point goes from east
Speaker 3: coast to Iowa, stops in Iowa, and everyone's like, we
Speaker 3: got to get it from Iowa to Frisco. Okay, because
Speaker 3: it's not transcontinental until it gets to the transit So great,
Speaker 3: but there's a looming timber famine, and train tracks need ties,
Speaker 3: and they need split rail fencing, and we don't have
Speaker 3: any trees to do it with and supply for everything else. Right,
Speaker 3: just so happens that this is around the time of
Speaker 3: the gold rush. So not only that, but now you've
Speaker 3: got all these people from the East coast through the
Speaker 3: Midwest going like get some gold. So they're going hell
Speaker 3: fire out to the west coast, right. Well, not everyone
Speaker 3: settles in the you know, by the plasters. They all
Speaker 3: kind of you know, to come down on the central
Speaker 3: coast and southern California, and there's not any trees. The
Speaker 3: native landscape is brown hills and chaparral and occasional live
Speaker 3: oaks and ryparian sycamores or white alders. In the elevations sidebar.
Speaker 3: People have been living here for millennia with no trees.
Speaker 3: Just fine. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, in the Southwest there are many river valleys that
Speaker 2: have cottonwood and sycamore and willow and mesquite, and there
Speaker 2: are varied biomes and forests, but the climate and the
Speaker 2: ecosystem is less densely forested out west than buck East.
Speaker 2: But on my website all link a short documentary about
Speaker 2: indigenous ecology called Spirit of the Trees Continuing Traditions of
Speaker 2: Southwest tribes, and there's much more on land management and
Speaker 2: forests in the Indigenous Fire Ecology episode with doctor Amy Christiansen,
Speaker 2: which I'll link in the show notes too.
Speaker 3: But I digress. So the European settler mindset is like trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees,
Speaker 3: How can people survive out here? So they're thinking about
Speaker 3: the Timmer famine and they're thinking, we have to settle
Speaker 3: down here, and we can't do that without trees. We
Speaker 3: don't have any firewood, we don't have any building material,
Speaker 3: we don't have any anything. So we got to get
Speaker 3: some trees planted and they not only that, but they
Speaker 3: have to grow fast, and we have to harvest fast.
Speaker 2: Oh man, right, it's a tree. Trees don't grow fast.
Speaker 2: It's the one thing they don't do, right, we need
Speaker 2: some faster snails around here. It's a snail. Let the
Speaker 2: thing grow.
Speaker 3: Let the thing grow.
Speaker 2: So they're like, what's the what's the microwave version of
Speaker 2: a tree?
Speaker 3: Pretty much now this is you know, and to be fair,
Speaker 3: this is after they've also decimated all the redwoods and
Speaker 3: cedars in the Pacific northwest. Right, it's chewing north California.
Speaker 3: It's chewing through them lumber locusts, lumber locust like just
Speaker 3: I can't even my heart. So anyway, they don't know
Speaker 3: exactly who and you know, brought them in. But basically
Speaker 3: Americans started visiting seed banks in Australia. They had learned
Speaker 3: they had already done some plantings in Europe with rave reviews,
Speaker 3: et cetera. So they're like, we got to get our
Speaker 3: hands on some of these eucalyptus seeds. We're going They
Speaker 3: got some now. Also, seed banks weren't a sophisticated so
Speaker 3: they didn't have a great crasp on which species. There's
Speaker 3: over seven hundred plus species of eucalyptus. Oh in Australia,
Speaker 3: so you know, it's hard to keep track. In the US,
Speaker 3: there's roughly two hundred plus still a lot, so it's confusing.
Speaker 3: But anyway, the point is is they they brought them
Speaker 3: in through San Francisco Bay started planting these eucalypse Okay, Now,
Speaker 3: there were like a lot of people that were fervent
Speaker 3: about growing these. There was like flyers everywhere there were.
Speaker 3: People were taking investment opportunities, like, look, you want to
Speaker 3: make some money. This is a surefire tree. These trees
Speaker 3: grow sixty feet in six years. And by the way,
Speaker 3: this blue gum Eucalyptus Eucalyptus globulus grows the fastest, like
Speaker 3: it's a rocket tree. So we are in luck. We
Speaker 3: got it all figured out. They started, they started planting
Speaker 3: eucalyptus the entire West coast, getting investment money. We're gonna
Speaker 3: make that timber, We're gonna make that money. We're gonna
Speaker 3: get that railroad gone. And what happens. They harvest them
Speaker 3: after fifteen twenty years, which is typical for deciduous trees.
Speaker 3: Eucalyptus is a myrtle, a little different ballgame, and it's
Speaker 3: also it grows interlocking grain, so it doesn't grow quite
Speaker 3: the same way, which is also like these variables that
Speaker 3: no one was really thinking about. So they're harvesting them young,
Speaker 3: and they're they're milling them up sawmills and they're letting
Speaker 3: them dry air dry, and they're warping and they're checking
Speaker 3: and they're splitting and they're like oh what. And people
Speaker 3: have like put all this money into it. Right now,
Speaker 3: this tree that was going to be a savior. People
Speaker 3: were using the oils and they were fixing their fevers
Speaker 3: and they were like this magic tree. Look at this tree.
Speaker 3: We have trees now went from that to this tree.
Speaker 3: It's invasive, it grows everywhere. Now it's shit ass wood.
Speaker 3: It ruined everything. We can't harvest any So now there's
Speaker 3: like forests up the coasts right and now they're just like, well,
Speaker 3: I can't use that. So that's the holdover mentality.
Speaker 2: People still have a grudge still, they're like, yeah, that
Speaker 2: one did me dirty right undred years.
Speaker 3: Ago, two hundred years ago or something, and it and
Speaker 3: it really makes you think about like culturally, like we
Speaker 3: pass on these like perspectives and these perceptions.
Speaker 2: I always wondered how we got so many of them.
Speaker 2: I've got one of my my neighbors got one over
Speaker 2: in my backyard. One day might fall on my head.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Loo. It's nice in good shade. The
Speaker 2: crows love it, and I love the crows. We have
Speaker 2: a good relationship. But when you are building with it,
Speaker 2: even though it did that warping and buckling and the
Speaker 2: cross grain, how do you manage that wood and make
Speaker 2: cool stuff out of it?
Speaker 3: Great question? And this is my one of my business partners.
Speaker 3: Todd is in charge of drying it has been up
Speaker 3: until now, and he has done some amazing work and
Speaker 3: I want to give him a shout out because he's
Speaker 3: kind of changed the way people think about eucalyptus in
Speaker 3: this area because you know the way he's dried it.
Speaker 3: So Todd Cooper shout out. But basically, when you harvest
Speaker 3: early like that twenty years you glt this and I
Speaker 3: was saying, it grows seasonally like every growth season, it
Speaker 3: switches the direction of the fibers growing upward. Wow, which
Speaker 3: until it's a really really mature tree is really squirrely
Speaker 3: for wood grain. Turns out if they did a little
Speaker 3: more research, and I know, hindsight sway twenty I'm not
Speaker 3: trying to be like, I know they were just doing
Speaker 3: their best. No internet, no internet did no internet, right.
Speaker 3: But there's people in Australia, whether it be they indigenous
Speaker 3: or settlers or whatever, they know they're like, look, you
Speaker 3: gotta let a eucalyptus tree grow a hundred years and
Speaker 3: then you can harvest it and it's great wood. And
Speaker 3: by the way, there's all these different kinds of species
Speaker 3: and they all have different purposes and whatever. So anyway,
Speaker 3: the way we do it here is instead of air drying,
Speaker 3: we can our air dry some species like Carimbia stato
Speaker 3: or lemon scented gum is like one where you're like,
Speaker 3: you know what, Actually you could air dry this one.
Speaker 3: It's not a big deal. It comes out nice. Blue gum,
Speaker 3: which is there's a ton of blue gum in California
Speaker 3: is one of those ones that's it's tough to air dry.
Speaker 3: But what we can do they didn't have then is
Speaker 3: killing drying technology, so we have dry kelnts nice so
Speaker 3: we can control. Basically, what was happening is the off
Speaker 3: gassing of water was happening too rapidly and so it
Speaker 3: just everything buckles. Typically, what you do is when you
Speaker 3: saw lumber. You let it air drive for a while
Speaker 3: until all the free water's gone. Yeah, they shout out
Speaker 3: to free water, and then you put it in the
Speaker 3: kiln to finish it off.
Speaker 2: And yeah, I know what that means. Yeah, I listened
Speaker 2: to a podcast about it, this one.
Speaker 3: So now with kiln drying technology, that's typically what you
Speaker 3: do with this particular wood. What we did again. Shout
Speaker 3: out to Todd. He was like, you know what, I think.
Speaker 3: We need to get this off the mill, like right
Speaker 3: off the mill. Like literally a board comes off the
Speaker 3: mill and you run it to you sprint to the
Speaker 3: kiln and get it in the kilt and you maintain
Speaker 3: that moisture so that it off gases more slowly. And
Speaker 3: in the kiln you start off very low and slow
Speaker 3: low temperature, low and slow time and let it off
Speaker 3: gas slowly, so you're controlling that off gassing and then
Speaker 3: you can dry it way more stably. So we have
Speaker 3: that advantage of killing joint technology. But when it's done
Speaker 3: that way, it's still tricky. But if you get it right,
Speaker 3: boy is it awesome. And blue gum we use for decking,
Speaker 3: we use for chunks as well, but we can get
Speaker 3: decking boards, perfect pristine decking boards out of bluegum. Eucalyptus.
Speaker 3: Now the flooring we use blue gum as well. We
Speaker 3: use lemon scented gum, we use red gum, we use
Speaker 3: sugar gum, even sugar sugar gum. So yeah, so it's great.
Speaker 3: So that's my that's my species.
Speaker 2: I love eucalyptus. Now, yes, I will hug one. Can
Speaker 2: I ask you some questions from listeners?
Speaker 3: Please?
Speaker 2: Okay? Yeah, but before we do, let's give away some
Speaker 2: cash because money does not grow on trees. Technically, United
Speaker 2: States paper bills are printed on linen and cotton. Now
Speaker 2: you know that. But each week we donate to a
Speaker 2: cause of anologist choosing because we like to try to
Speaker 2: make a difference. And this week Jeff chose the Mother
Speaker 2: Tree Project, which is a nonprofit that funds long term
Speaker 2: research to identify future forest management practices that will help
Speaker 2: our forests remain productive and diverse and resilient as the
Speaker 2: climate changes. And it's led by world renowned forest ecologist
Speaker 2: doctor Simard, who wrote Finding the Mother Tree, and doctor Simmard,
Speaker 2: Jeff says is an idol of his. You can learn
Speaker 2: more at mothertreeproject dot org. That's linked in the show notes,
Speaker 2: and thank you to sponsors for making that donation possible. Okay,
Speaker 2: I saw your questions. Let's answer them. Trevor Doughty had
Speaker 2: a great question. Everyone asks you this. I'm sure, why
Speaker 2: do we call them two by fourth when they aren't
Speaker 2: two by four?
Speaker 3: This is a great question, wowser's okay, So they were
Speaker 3: once upon a time two inch by four inch.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: As framing shifted from balloon frame to balloon framing was
Speaker 3: a type of framing where you still had studs, okay,
Speaker 3: traveling vertically on a wall, but the floor system was
Speaker 3: a little different. It basically were cavities on the exterior
Speaker 3: walls that again hindsight being twenty twenty, fires would once
Speaker 3: they started, they would come up through those bays, so
Speaker 3: they spread way too fast. So that's why balloon framing
Speaker 3: kind of like, Okay, the one and a half by
Speaker 3: three and a half, which is a nominal two by four.
Speaker 2: That means we call it something that it's not, like
Speaker 2: how pon nouff means new bridge but it's the oldest
Speaker 2: bridge in Paris. Or a friend whose phone contact is
Speaker 2: still their maiden name because you've known them since like
Speaker 2: two thousand and six. Anyway, two by.
Speaker 3: Fours came about, I believe because of industry, a switch
Speaker 3: to stick framing, which is the current standard for framing houses,
Speaker 3: because of the plantings, because of the succession plantings. And
Speaker 3: I think the fish and see it's they're easier to carry.
Speaker 3: They're just smaller and if done sixteen inch on center,
Speaker 3: you still have the stability. They were like, why are
Speaker 3: we We're wasting lumber. We're you know, we're making it
Speaker 3: harder on carpenters and all the things framers. Yeah, so,
Speaker 3: as far as I know, my knowledge is that it
Speaker 3: was a combination between framing technique and also industry just
Speaker 3: wanting to be more efficient.
Speaker 2: But you can get more out of a tree, so
Speaker 2: that's good, right, Okay, Okay, I like them. Now Elijah
Speaker 2: wants to know. Elijah's six year old. Not a lot
Speaker 2: of six year olds listening to the podcast, given how
Speaker 2: much is a six year old? I know, I'm like,
Speaker 2: I'm sorry for the swearing, but my six year old
Speaker 2: wants to know why wood is hard when other plants
Speaker 2: are soft and bendy.
Speaker 3: Oh wow, so the wood is essentially you got cellulose.
Speaker 3: I want to say roughly half of wood is cellulose.
Speaker 3: Then there's hemy cellulose, and then which is like just
Speaker 3: a different molecular structure, and the last bit is lignan.
Speaker 3: And the lignin is what is like the tie between cells.
Speaker 3: It's like an inner cellular like binder. Oh okay for
Speaker 3: all the woodness. Ah, there's lignin in all kinds of plants.
Speaker 3: It's just I think the concentration of it in wood,
Speaker 3: I think is what gives it its.
Speaker 2: Makes it tougher. Yeah, I feel like there's got to
Speaker 2: be a lot in the end of an asparagus stock.
Speaker 2: You know, when you get to the end of the
Speaker 2: asparagus stock and you're like, can't count cho that's the
Speaker 2: that's the cutoff. So to recap Cellulose is a polymer
Speaker 2: made of glucose, and it gives wood most of its strength,
Speaker 2: and lignin is a polymer made of phenols, which are
Speaker 2: lightly acidic aromatic compounds. Lignin acts as a binder or
Speaker 2: a matrix for the cellulose and Hemicellulose is also a binder,
Speaker 2: but it's made of a bunch of different sugar compounds.
Speaker 2: So I'm sorry, what's happening in asparagus? I almost cut
Speaker 2: that part of the inner out because I was like, Lord,
Speaker 2: why are you bullshitting about asparagus right now? But I
Speaker 2: looked it up and it turns out I'm a genius.
Speaker 2: I found a scintillating publication, the Journal of Food Packaging
Speaker 2: and Shelf Life, which had a twenty twenty sensual study
Speaker 2: called Longitudinal analysis of lignin deposition in green asparagus by
Speaker 2: microscopede during high oxygen modified atmosphere packaging, and it confirmed
Speaker 2: my suspicions, saying lignification is the most important factor that
Speaker 2: negatively affects quality of fresh green asparagus and limits its
Speaker 2: marketability after harvest. Lignin doesn't soften when cooked, so unless
Speaker 2: you want your dinner guests to gnaw logs at your table,
Speaker 2: you got to snap the end of the spears instead
Speaker 2: of cutting them. And in terms of their pee, there's
Speaker 2: nothing you can do to stop the asparagusic acid from
Speaker 2: breaking down into sulfur. But you can keep a candle
Speaker 2: in the bathroom or encourage your friends to rejoice in
Speaker 2: having a functioning body with working kidneys, and from more
Speaker 2: on that you can listen to the Nephology episode, which
Speaker 2: will teach you that transplant recipients get to keep their
Speaker 2: old kidneys, and some people just have like a few
Speaker 2: extra kidneys in the back, like your uncle's old Mustang
Speaker 2: under a tarp in the driveway that he just can't
Speaker 2: seem to get rid of. Just keep it there. I
Speaker 2: regret wants to know how rare is spalted wood and
Speaker 2: does it kill the tree? And can you tell a
Speaker 2: tree is spaulted before you cut it? I want to
Speaker 2: know what a spalted mean? What is that word?
Speaker 3: Great one? So spaulting in a in wood is a
Speaker 3: fungal characteristic. You'll see they're typically at least around here,
Speaker 3: black lines in the wood. M h if I have
Speaker 3: any around here. But there's also spaulting that is, Oh
Speaker 3: here's some. This is spaulting sycamore right here.
Speaker 2: Come on now, Oh so like little like darker, darker lines.
Speaker 3: Oh okay, yeah, so that's a typical spalt But there's
Speaker 3: also like rust colored, spongy looking like you were to
Speaker 3: take like a sponge painting on a wall kind of thing.
Speaker 3: There's also hot pink. I know when I first started
Speaker 3: doing this, I remember like seeing wood that was drying,
Speaker 3: like who is drawing on the wood. But it's a
Speaker 3: it's a fungus. I don't believe that these fungi are
Speaker 3: harming or helping these particular ones. So a mic horiezal
Speaker 3: fungi fungi at the root system is like the support
Speaker 3: network for a lot of different species and interspecies and
Speaker 3: all that stuff. So those fungi are like, you know,
Speaker 3: super important, super important for trees. There are other fungi
Speaker 3: that can kill a tree really fast. And I don't
Speaker 3: know the ins and the oils of all that, but
Speaker 3: spaulting is it happens around here a lot to our sycamores,
Speaker 3: our silver maple, and I believe it has to do with, yeah,
Speaker 3: the decay over time, as they're just kind of declining,
Speaker 3: there's more spaulting happening in the wood.
Speaker 2: So is just a little bit of fungus giving a
Speaker 2: fun pattern. And apparently you can spalt lumber on purpose
Speaker 2: and shove it into a bag to get kind of moldy.
Speaker 2: And one website I looked at called Sunketcher Studio advises
Speaker 2: that ingredients that contain nitrogen or organics and sugar will
Speaker 2: help speed up the spaulting process. This can include horse manure, fertilizer,
Speaker 2: and leaves. They continue. I have had a specially good
Speaker 2: luck using two cans of beer. One can of beer
Speaker 2: you pour on the wood, the other can you drink.
Speaker 2: I like this person. They seem fun to have a
Speaker 2: spulted log with. We have a question about burrels that
Speaker 2: Niemeringer wants to know. What's the deal with burrels? As
Speaker 2: a kid hiking in the woods, I heard stories of
Speaker 2: majorly cool trees being cut just for their burrels and
Speaker 2: the rest of the lumber just being left to rot.
Speaker 2: It made me think of ivory and rhinohorn poaching, and
Speaker 2: frankly still horrifies me. But do some species of tree
Speaker 2: have more burrel? Like walnut has more burrel?
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: Is what is a burrel?
Speaker 3: They're sprouts? Yeah, there's sprouts, so, and there's sprouts that
Speaker 3: don't necessarily continue to shoot. So redwoods everybody loves redwoods,
Speaker 3: no argument there. Everyone loves redwoods everyone. So basically those
Speaker 3: are ligno tubers. They have those. You ever see at
Speaker 3: the base of a redwood tree a bunch of little
Speaker 3: shits coming out? Yeah, And typically when a redwood tree
Speaker 3: comes out, the root system or the root ball typically
Speaker 3: has a huge burl, not typically, but often has a
Speaker 3: huge burrel at the base of the tree, to which
Speaker 3: woodworkers are like, save the root system, save it, save it,
Speaker 3: save it, And yeah, it's a bunch of sprouts that
Speaker 3: didn't take. And it's the same for yeah, for any species.
Speaker 3: I had no idea ingrown sprouts.
Speaker 2: So a burled tree can also mean a stressed tree.
Speaker 2: Insect infestation, brush fires, and bad weather can make the
Speaker 2: tree do the dendrological equivalent of panicking, making a ball
Speaker 2: of sprouts in case its main tree can no longer function.
Speaker 2: So when you see borldwood, just think about a tree
Speaker 2: reading about an impending tragedy and making tons of babies.
Speaker 2: Now burls make me sad. Oops, I thought this was
Speaker 2: a great one. Furoria Lily wants to know what classifies
Speaker 2: a tree as old growth and what can we do
Speaker 2: to protect old growth forests and why are they important
Speaker 2: versus young growth? So when you were talking about forests
Speaker 2: that are just like planted, and then that's the new growth.
Speaker 3: Right, Yes, there's a lot of different classifications, and I
Speaker 3: get confused. There's old growth, there's new growth, there's first
Speaker 3: growth second growth. I believe that the different growth stages
Speaker 3: are harvest from a given organism. So if you plant
Speaker 3: a tree and you cut it down, that's first growth.
Speaker 3: But old growth, I thinks, as is typically talked about,
Speaker 3: are trees that were in a forest that was not harvested,
Speaker 3: that are like and really tight growth rings and are
Speaker 3: just very old trees.
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay, so let's do a quick rundown on that.
Speaker 2: So old growth forests haven't been logged, and the Food
Speaker 2: and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations says they are
Speaker 2: naturally regenerated forests of native tree species where there are
Speaker 2: clearly no visible indications of human activity and the ecological
Speaker 2: processes are not significantly disturbed. That is an old growth forest.
Speaker 2: About a third of forests in the world are old
Speaker 2: growth and they're mostly in Brazil, Canada and Russia. Old
Speaker 2: growth forests are hanging on to a lot of carbon
Speaker 2: and species. Now second growth or new growth forests have
Speaker 2: been harvested and they're growing back. Now, how long does
Speaker 2: it take for a second growth or new growth forest
Speaker 2: to be an old growth. Well, it can take a
Speaker 2: hardwood forest in the US between one hundred and fifty
Speaker 2: to five hundred years to regain old growthy characteristics up
Speaker 2: to thousands of years for other forests, and most forests
Speaker 2: in the US and Europe are on their second lap,
Speaker 2: the old growth long gone to practices of colonization. And
Speaker 2: I was recently visiting my cousin Nate, who showed me
Speaker 2: a table he built from this densely ringed old growth wood.
Speaker 2: And this lost log was cut one hundred years ago
Speaker 2: but was just recently dredged up from a chili lake
Speaker 2: by the same timber company. My cousin up in Montana
Speaker 2: was talking about how logs would fly down the river,
Speaker 2: old old logs sink, it would be anaerobic enough where
Speaker 2: some of those logs get dredged up, and then you
Speaker 2: have this really really compact old growth, old old logs
Speaker 2: that have just been in water. Does that happen? I mean,
Speaker 2: because that is can water be a preservative in that case?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, And it's beautiful and it's often like really
Speaker 3: dark wood. There's also bog logs, I know, like in
Speaker 3: the UK, like in the bogs in the UK that
Speaker 3: logs that have been submerged for hundreds of years and
Speaker 3: then they pull them up and they mail them in
Speaker 3: a lumber and it's used for like gorgeous, gorgeous furniture
Speaker 3: and stuff like that.
Speaker 2: Also just bog logs, like boglogs. Someone get boglogs dot com. Yeah, totally, No,
Speaker 2: I think it is because yeah, Feoral Lily submitted a
Speaker 2: few questions and one of them was what's the deal
Speaker 2: with bog oak trees?
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there you go, there you go.
Speaker 2: They had this question too. Are there any tree species
Speaker 2: that we should straight up avoid buying to stop encouraging
Speaker 2: logging of that resource? Is there one that it's like,
Speaker 2: lay off this one.
Speaker 3: Everyone because it's such good lumber that kind of thing, Yeah.
Speaker 2: Or just its harvest is maybe not done well, or
Speaker 2: it's like let let these mahoganies or epe or something
Speaker 2: just like keep chilling in a forest.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think forest management is a whole thing that
Speaker 3: deserves a lot of brain power to put our minds
Speaker 3: back on how to do it right. Our current system
Speaker 3: is again, I think it's a hole over from a
Speaker 3: post industrial like mindset which is just devoid of our
Speaker 3: relationship with with forests, with trees. Robin wall Kimer, there
Speaker 3: you go in bringing sweet grass and talking about the
Speaker 3: black ash, basket weaving or harvest. You know, there's no
Speaker 3: like conservationists like don't ever touch the trees or anything
Speaker 3: like that. But there's a participation and there's an honor,
Speaker 3: and there's a dance, and there's a reciprocity, as she
Speaker 3: would say.
Speaker 2: For more on Doctor Robin wall Kimer, see our biology
Speaker 2: episode about Moss linked in the show notes what an episode.
Speaker 2: I love her, We love her.
Speaker 3: I think until forest management can get back to reciprocity,
Speaker 3: I mean, I would say all species are in danger,
Speaker 3: just as any non human being is in danger of
Speaker 3: what we're up to, you know, I mean, are there
Speaker 3: certain species of animals that we shouldn't hunt more? But yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean, just like we need to just overhaul our
Speaker 3: whole mindset. Yeah again, pre Industrial Revolution, Treeheart was the
Speaker 3: world over. Indigenous communities the world over for millennia and
Speaker 3: as far back as we can go, people built with wood.
Speaker 3: But the way that the forests were managed was like
Speaker 3: a woodlot. So he would essentially you would cut down
Speaker 3: a section of a woodlot managed by the community. And
Speaker 3: this is pre land ownership, so this was not anyone's
Speaker 3: land to own. This was everyone's land. In the community
Speaker 3: and they would harvest a section of the forest coppice
Speaker 3: they've cut at the base and then let it re sprout,
Speaker 3: and they would do that on twenty fifteen, twenty year increment.
Speaker 3: So the next year you would go to the next
Speaker 3: section cut that while this one's growing back. You go
Speaker 3: all the way around and you've got woodlots that trees
Speaker 3: are thousands of years old and they've been participated with
Speaker 3: There's an incredible book by William Bryant Logan called sprout Lands,
Speaker 3: and he actually did this whole deep dive into the
Speaker 3: history of this, and he also talks about how flora
Speaker 3: and fauna, the ecology of a participated in woodlot just
Speaker 3: booms and there's like three times the amount of plants, insects,
Speaker 3: animals in a forest that is being participated with humans.
Speaker 2: This seemed bonkers to me, so I surfed the bibliography
Speaker 2: of Sproutlands and then literally a few hours later realized
Speaker 2: that I had been deep in papers such as Late
Speaker 2: Mesolithic and Early Neolithic Forest Disturbance, a high resolution paleo
Speaker 2: ecological test of human impact hypotheses and the potential role
Speaker 2: of humans in structuring the wooded landscapes of Mesolithic Ireland,
Speaker 2: A Review of Data and Discussion of Approaches, both papers
Speaker 2: from twenty thirteen, which seemed like just a banger year
Speaker 2: for publishing stuff about neolithic forest farming. But yes, coppist growth,
Speaker 2: according to the book Sproutlands is not a single thing,
Speaker 2: but a synthetic ecosystem in which human participates is a key.
Speaker 2: Far more species of plants, insects, birds, and other creatures
Speaker 2: inhabit such a mixed landscape then would live in an
Speaker 2: untouched woodland. And for more on this you can see
Speaker 2: that book Sproutlands by William Bryant. Logan and to pollard
Speaker 2: is to cut certain trees at about head height so
Speaker 2: that grazing animals can't reach the young shoots that sprout
Speaker 2: from that cut surface, while coppassing is cutting closer to
Speaker 2: the ground so that the new shoots of the tree
Speaker 2: grow from that stump. And yes, I looked it up,
Speaker 2: and you can coppice an apple tree, which gives me
Speaker 2: hope for the giving tree, even though most apple trees,
Speaker 2: as we learn from the dendrology episode, are grafted. But
Speaker 2: if the giving tree just grows into one that makes shitty,
Speaker 2: malformed apples full of bitterness and worms and gets left
Speaker 2: to hell alone. I'm happy for the giving tree. I'm
Speaker 2: happy for.
Speaker 3: It plant any species if that's the mentality. But in
Speaker 3: the current system of commoditizing for commodity's sake, and I
Speaker 3: get it from a demand standpoint, these would lots. This
Speaker 3: is when there was half a billion people on the planet.
Speaker 3: Now there's eight billion people on the planet. It's a
Speaker 3: different ballgame. But I think we can still get back
Speaker 3: to that mentality and do forest management a lot differently
Speaker 3: than we're doing it.
Speaker 2: What about reclaimed wood and barnwood that is being you know,
Speaker 2: taken apart one by one, or even if there's demolitions,
Speaker 2: the idea of going and trying to take as many
Speaker 2: beams as possible and reuse it. Are people doing more
Speaker 2: of that? And it is that lumber.
Speaker 3: Accessible to people totally?
Speaker 2: Are there good places to look for that?
Speaker 3: Yeah, there's places here that are awesome. One of them
Speaker 3: has gone out of business, the Reclaimer at Tarzana, which
Speaker 3: is a bummer. There's also a tree line in Frogtown
Speaker 3: Habitat for Humanity, the Restore. So there are places that
Speaker 3: do that around here and they're awesome, and I think
Speaker 3: that is a great idea. But it's all systems. It's
Speaker 3: all like how we live in anomic system? So how
Speaker 3: can you from a process standpoint do it viably? And
Speaker 3: these people have the relationship with a contract, a demo contractor,
Speaker 3: they have a schedule. They're like, okay, the demo contractor
Speaker 3: is like, great, you have these three days to extract
Speaker 3: all the all the timbers that you want. They go in,
Speaker 3: they do it. They have a whole facility set up,
Speaker 3: and that way, by that process being streamlined, it's not
Speaker 3: crazy expensive. People can like go to that reclaim lumberyard
Speaker 3: and they do and they use all of it.
Speaker 2: I love that, right, I love that.
Speaker 3: It's incredible.
Speaker 2: Does it ever piss you off? As someone who has
Speaker 2: a live edge table from you beloved the most cherished
Speaker 2: piece of furniture in my house from yes, a samilash
Speaker 2: which I didn't know that was a species of tree.
Speaker 2: Does it ever piss you off when you see things
Speaker 2: cut to look like live edge that are not live edge?
Speaker 3: That pisses me up feeling? Can I be real right now? Yah? Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's that's not that's messed up. Can't do that. That's
Speaker 3: that's what we were about, Like the kind of like, oh,
Speaker 3: this is how it's supposed to like, yeah, come on,
Speaker 3: well yeah, like get a get a grip.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I know, I figured whenever I see that in
Speaker 2: the catalogs, I'm like, I've met that fisiness.
Speaker 3: Well you get a grip.
Speaker 2: Uh. Clara NRK wants to know if you have a
Speaker 2: favorite smelling wood.
Speaker 3: Oh man, that's a tough one. I mean d R
Speaker 3: cedar is the Himalayan cedar and syandemic to the Himalays.
Speaker 3: But that's the most common urban seater that we have here.
Speaker 3: M h boy, oh boy, that's my favorite. I think
Speaker 3: so smelly, so good, so smelly, so good.
Speaker 2: What about the worst thing about your job? What sucks?
Speaker 2: What's the most frustrating thing? The worst thing?
Speaker 3: I sound so annoying, but I really love it. I
Speaker 3: really really something. I was a disclaimer.
Speaker 2: Okay, okay, you must have like one toenail that fell
Speaker 2: off years ago for under a log or something.
Speaker 3: Yeah well yeah, yeah, plenty, Okay, but this one, but
Speaker 3: this one's more. Actually, I could really use the help
Speaker 3: of anyone in our community that's listening on this one.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: I'm all weirs because I can't figure out, so we
Speaker 3: we get the biggest bane of my existence at my
Speaker 3: job is we can't use we can. We haven't figured
Speaker 3: out yet how to use every single mor soul of
Speaker 3: our trees. So obviously we make lumber. But that's that's
Speaker 3: roughly eighty percent of a log. That's I don't know
Speaker 3: if that might be inaccurate, but I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 3: estimate roughly eighty percent of a log is made into lumber.
Speaker 3: Well what about the other twenty percent? That's a lot
Speaker 3: of what we have. We cut a lot of logs
Speaker 3: in a year. The sawdust we have solved, thank god,
Speaker 3: through La Compost. We give them all of our sawdust
Speaker 3: and they is it for browns for their for their
Speaker 3: food waste to make for compost, which is awesome. But
Speaker 3: our slash, meaning the stuff that's kind of like, we
Speaker 3: don't know what to do with this. We we've started
Speaker 3: splitting firewood and having it for community like restaurants and
Speaker 3: wood ovens and stuff like that, but it's not like
Speaker 3: a streamlined thing yet. And the rest of it we
Speaker 3: bring to a mulcha for mulch and we're like, yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess that's fine, but like, I know, there's a
Speaker 3: better way to do this, and it just crushes my soul.
Speaker 2: Coasters about coasters.
Speaker 3: We could do coasters. It's a lot.
Speaker 2: That's a lot of coasters.
Speaker 3: But they're like pieces of wood like this, they're like
Speaker 3: weird pieces. Yeah, like I don't even know how do
Speaker 3: I dry this? How I cut it? What do we do?
Speaker 2: There must be carvers whitdlers, Yes, a brigade of whitdlers
Speaker 2: showing up the Witler brigade. There's gotta be one. But
Speaker 2: so maybe a little bit of hive mind? Is that that?
Speaker 3: Yes, what to do with it?
Speaker 2: Yes, that's the worst thing.
Speaker 3: Yes, okay, I mean maybe team percent, but.
Speaker 2: Yes, okay, follow them an Angel City lumber and give
Speaker 2: them some ideas. Also you can gaze at their gorgeous
Speaker 2: stumps and slabs and such. What it's the best thing
Speaker 2: about the job?
Speaker 3: Oh man? Can I give a few couple? Our team
Speaker 3: is like, there's fifteen of us here and they are
Speaker 3: like angel people. I don't know, I like this would
Speaker 3: not what we've accomplished already and we have a long
Speaker 3: way to go. Is like it's just as testament to
Speaker 3: like the people that are just like, let's do this.
Speaker 3: They're so incredible. All every single one of them, and
Speaker 3: the ones that have worked here that don't any longer
Speaker 3: just incredible people. So that's one. But obviously I think
Speaker 3: the main event is obviously that I feel that we
Speaker 3: are contributing to a shift and mentality to the more
Speaker 3: than human world around us. And I think we're contributing
Speaker 3: to a new sacred and we're contributing to our community.
Speaker 3: That's the best part is like really communing with a
Speaker 3: living being and honoring that being as you know, living
Speaker 3: on and like I mentioned earlier, like to put a
Speaker 3: pin in that to the aversion to death. The culture
Speaker 3: I think we have is like we get to look
Speaker 3: at death head on and and share it as opposed
Speaker 3: to like be scared of it or look the other
Speaker 3: way to it. We deal with death every single day,
Speaker 3: and we get to deal with it in a way
Speaker 3: that's really beautiful and reverent. And I think that that's
Speaker 3: like by far the best part. You know, Mulco smells
Speaker 3: real good.
Speaker 2: Yeah, smells great. Death never smelled so good.
Speaker 3: Death never smelled so good.
Speaker 2: You can put on the coasters. Thank you so much
Speaker 2: for doing this.
Speaker 3: Thank you so much.
Speaker 2: Mash joy and absolute joy. So ask soft hearted people,
Speaker 2: hard questions because there's a good chance that they've been
Speaker 2: asked before and they love telling you the answers again.
Speaker 2: Angel City Lumber follow them on social media linked to
Speaker 2: the show notes. They only sell locally to LA, but
Speaker 2: I listed a bunch of other companies that Jeff mentioned,
Speaker 2: plus studies and books that we talked about at aliwar
Speaker 2: dot com, slash Ologies, slash Ziology. Happy Wooden Anniversary to
Speaker 2: us all, and thank you Jeff for joining us. Thank
Speaker 2: you to everyone at patreon dot com slash Ologies for
Speaker 2: supporting from before we were ever even launched. You can
Speaker 2: join for a dollar a month and some a bit. Questions.
Speaker 2: Merch is available at ologiesmerch dot com and thank you
Speaker 2: Suzinhale for managing that and so much more. Thank you
Speaker 2: Noel Dilworth for all the scheduling help. Aaron Talbert admins
Speaker 2: Theologies podcast Facebook group with This is from Bonni Dutch
Speaker 2: and Chhann and felts Us at the podcast. You are that.
Speaker 2: Mercedes Maitland and Seagred Biggest Thomas of mindcham Media make
Speaker 2: this Smologies episodes, which are short, twenty minute episodes that
Speaker 2: are classroom safe. Kelly Ardwyer helps with the website and
Speaker 2: she can make yours. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music.
Speaker 2: Emily White of the Wordery makes professional transcripts in Caleb
Speaker 2: Patten Bleeps episodes, and those are up at alleywar dot
Speaker 2: com slash ologies dash extras for free. And the man
Speaker 2: who treats us all so well and edits these episodes
Speaker 2: is the one and only Jared Sleeper, who had a
Speaker 2: mullet trim and a birthday this week. Happy birthday to
Speaker 2: someone who makes the planet better. What a guy. And
Speaker 2: if you stick around until the end of the episode,
Speaker 2: I tell you secret. And this week tonight, Jarrett decided
Speaker 2: to make some apple sauce from scratch, and he peeled
Speaker 2: the apples like a normal human. And then I asked
Speaker 2: him to not throw away the apple peels, because I
Speaker 2: made a salad of just the apple peels with some
Speaker 2: chunks of cheddar cheese and some walnuts in it. And
Speaker 2: a few years ago I would have hesitated longer and
Speaker 2: not had this self assurance to say, please save that garbage.
Speaker 2: I'd like to eat the garbage, but there's just something
Speaker 2: about the texture of appeal. I went for it, no regrets.
Speaker 2: My favorite part of potato is a skin, but if
Speaker 2: we're being honest, A potato really only has two parts.
Speaker 2: It has the inside and the outside. Also, I eat
Speaker 2: everyone's pizza crust. I don't even care how well I
Speaker 2: know them. I'm like a dumpster rat.
Speaker 6: Who can drive a car. Okay, bye bye.
Speaker 3: I respect wood, I revere wood. I'm considerate of wood.
Speaker 2: Get value.
Speaker 4: You can't argue with Attezco with their amazing club card prices.
Speaker 4: Have the perfect night in with their finest frozen pizza
Speaker 4: meal deal. Get the finest frozen pizza, chips and ice
Speaker 4: cream all for six euro. Like a delicious spicy salami,
Speaker 4: hot on and doya or Margarito, wood fired pizzas served
Speaker 4: up with their crispy, chunky chips and ice cream like
Speaker 4: sea salta caramel or pistachio for dessert. Can't argue with
Speaker 4: that shopping store or online Tesco. Every little helps available
Speaker 4: in most stores, Prices varying.
Speaker 3: Express