Last week we received the following letter from a reader — or Googler, more likely — in Waipawa, New Zealand.
Editor:
I have about 20 redwoods about 70 yr old and have just felled one to use the timber, but I am a bit ignorant of its qualities and how it should be milled, stored or dried. I see that some consider that it needs to be 90 years before it develops its decay resistant properties. I would like to use the timber for garage door and garden furniture (outside exposure) and possibly for a renovated kitchen! Would appreciate any hints by e-mail.
New Zealand, if you didn’t know, is positively bristling with imported redwoods. What the eucalyptus is to California, the redwood is to New Zealand.
Waipawa, we see, is about a four-hour drive from the famous
Rotorua Redwoods
, which were planted in 1901. Back in 2005, our Jim Hight
wrote about a plan to grow the tree commercially in the country
. The firm involved is now called
The New Zealand Redwood Company
, a subsidiary of California’s Soper-Wheeler Co., and they’ve now got over 1,700 hectares of redwoods planted and awaiting harvest. Which could be pretty impressive, depending on how big a hectare is. I have no idea.
But while those trees are growing, do you have any advice for our Kiwi friend? They gave us Flight of the Conchords, so we owe them something. Something more than our trees, I mean. Like, what the hell to do with them once they’ve been felled.
Picture:
Redwood Forest, Rotorua
by
David Wall
.
This article appears in Nobody’s Fault.
Yes, put him in touch with Gene Callahan.
So Jen, i thought you told us all that the native plant society was aganist homes in TPZ lands because this was the only place in the world that the redwood grew. What up chic-ie-pooh?
A Hectare is a 100 X 100 meter square (10,000 square meters), if you were really wondering, Hank.
What’s an acre?
God, I love the metric system! It’s so rational. Maybe that’s why it didn’t work out in ‘merica.
WTF IS A “METER”?????
An acre is 10 square chains. What’s so hart about that?
Back in the 1980s NZFP had a lot of older redwoods near Tokaroa and didn’t know what to do with them. Wood was useless since it wasn’t radiata pine and the darn kept resprouting when you cut them down…
“WTF IS A “METER”?????”
A member of a certain 70’s funk band?
“WTF IS A “METER”?????”
“A member of a certain 70’s funk band?”
It’s more complicated now. There are the Funky Meters with some original members of the band from N’Arlins, and there’s The Meters Experience, which is Meters’ guitarist Leo Nocentelli and assorted friends. Incidentally, Leo and the Meters Experience are playing at the Mateel’s Sum Funk mini-fest June 7, at Benbow.
ha…careful worm eater…i know how people like you work to infect our kids minds with your ‘rock n’ roll’ subjugation.
We need to send some forest defenders to NZ. Sounds like their “old growth” is under attack.