Thanks for your insights Will, I have always enjoyed your posts here and elsewhere as well.
Our mud season is here also but it goes all the way through the winter. We do not freeze as deeply, we go through freeze/thaw cycles throughout the winter. The grass began to grow this week, and none too soon, the yard around my little mill is a mess. Maple blossoms littered the ground after this last rain and wind. I've had my first run in with a bit of bluestain this past week. We've been under the spring burn ban for about a month and it'll go for about 3 more weeks. Logging continues throughout the year here. The larger local mill saws 10MBF/hour. I'm on the Blue Ridge, looking north I see the Valley and Ridge country, 30 miles from there is the Allegheney Plateau. The rocks beneath my feet are precambrian, I can see what was ancient seabed and the plateau was a forest that is now a bed of coal.
I am always working towards my own understanding. The old timers were certainly not ignorant and were often far better observers than we. I was pretty much following reference materials that came from ivory towers. Those folks can be wrong as well but this is material I've also studied from my teens. Part of my trying to be in tune with the material. What I wrote does seem to mesh with my observations over the years. In all of this I do like to hear other opinions and observations, it makes us all think differently. The ponding part I hadn't thought about in quite some time. My Dutch father in law had talked about seeing the old timers sinking timbers in seawater prior to use in his youth but didn't know the reason why. I've also heard of ponding acid woods to lower the tannins. I don't know more about either.
Heartwood is dead, there is very little change throughout the year in it. The old timers prized heartwood, often removing the sapwood. The early timber also had a lower percentage of sapwood and it was in a narrower band on the slower growing tree. Bluestain, sapstain, does not affect heartwood.
The resistance meters I own and have used say that they are not accurate much above fiber saturation point. They are measuring in the billionths of an ohm and with saturation more variables come into play. They really can't differentiate between a half filled cell lumen and one that is full. They also need to be temperature corrected. When measuring bound water in an empty cell they are accurate. Weight works more accurately throughout the range but trees are individuals, metering or weighing one freshly cut tree in summer and another tree in winter might be analagous to weighing a lean person in spring and a fat one in the fall. It takes a pretty fair sample size to draw meaningful conclusions. In none of that am I saying your observations are wrong, they may be spot on, I'm just offering more to think about.
Our pine does bleed resin whenever it warms up a bit, winter or summer. I changed the picture in my first post to the stump of a tree by the drive that I had to cut and pull over this Febuary, its now late March and it has exuded a fair amount of resin. I moved a 6x6 from it the other day without gloves and regretted it. We are still about 2 months from pine's big growth spurt for the year.
Back to Timbeal's comment, yes oils cut sap where it is impervious to water. I like homemade lye soap with lavender blossoms in it. Side ramble; We were trying an experiment one year using a flame weeder in the garden to keep weeds down. Everything was working pretty well till my wife got to a row of lavender. The row exploded into a running streak of fire. I suspect we could run cars off of lavender oil.
I recall a line of us all chained together trying to get out of one of those WI bogs one winter day when a neighbor down the road from the job thought it was firm enough for him to cross. There are definite advantages to winter logging, I'd rather saw snow than mud anyday.
