Don – I can’t speak to the chemical composition of or the seasonal levels of those chemicals in the sap of any particular specie, but only to the seasonal changes both in the wood, and in the local forest economy as I observe and understand it to be.
The last few days are a good example of this. The snowpak has been thinning as fast as the mud is getting deep. The smell of woodsmoke is still heavy in the air despite the last few days and nights being the warmest we’ve seen since October, both because sap is running in the sugarbush and some are spending their nights tending the evaporators, and because folks are burning windfall slash from an icestorm early this winter while there is still snow on the ground. When the white is gone such fires will be taboo until the world turns green again.
There’s a landing a half mile down the road, loaded up with sawlogs, a skidder sits next to the pile. Nobody has touched either in ten days or better, and nobody will for another three weeks at best. Weight limits are posted on all the secondary roads while the frost falls out of the ground. Happily this coincides with the same six weeks in the year when mechanized logging might should be suspended.
Log yards at all the area mills are piled high with wintercut, hundreds of thousands of board feet, some in the millions, (the biggest mill in my town produces 2.8 MMBF annually) but most of it won’t be touched till midsummer by anything more than the sprinklers placed to deny the beasties of oxygen. As soon as the trucks start rolling for the mills again, the spring and early summer wood they carry will hit the debarkers within days of hitting the yard. While this yes, is due to the seasonal shifts in chemical composition that leave wintercut less hospitable to the fungi that cause sapstain…
This is not the only reason wintercut timber was historically and is still is held in higher regard than that from the rest of the year.
There clearly are internal things happening seasonally. This is most easily recognized and exemplified by the rapid growth that will soon be happening in cambium layers that will have bark peeling at a sideways glance instead of clinging like burdocks
My personal observations of the wood itself – I have stuck it with quality meters meant for timber and it does tend to be slightly (2-4%) lower in MC, The pines do not bleed the little beads of sap (the talk of sticky on the other thread which elicited my comments) that spring and summer wood does.
Most importantly, though I don’t know why, I believe it is quicker to give up its bound water. This belief is based on observation, and attempts to have a ready supply of dry brace stock, and keeping a stock of small scantling FOHC. It seems to thoroughly season in just one summer if wintercut, while recognizable curves which I know to have been harvested in other seasons, hold onto their weight much longer.
Anyway, this is just me, trying to be in tune with the material I use and the world it comes from, and my belief that it is part of how to best engage in the discipline of green woodworking that timberframing is.
