Log Soakin

[Handy Andy]

  Bein a farmer has some benefits, I have a couple ponds used for water for cows, and a few walnut trees, what I have been doing is putting the walnut logs in the pond till I get around to sawing them, the brown seems to work its way closer to the bark.
  Anyway I cut down a dead walnut tree once, and it had hardly any sap wood.  So
I figured it had to do with the roots keeping the log with moisture.  Maybe wrong?
Anyway, I have tried just dumping the whole log into the water, and also just pushing the end down into the water.  Does just having one end in keep all the wood wet?
  As far as walnut goes, seemed about the same.
  The thing is, it is hard to get logs out of the pond if you get them far enough out to float, and a lot easier if one end is on the bank.  Have a couple down there now that
I would like to get out, and they have gotten to a hard place to get hold of. 

[burlman]

since they closed up the log drive on our local river there is a vast choice of tug boats laying around. how big is your pond????

[fuzzybear]

Have you thought about attaching marine grade rope the one end of the log when you sink it?  You could run the ropes to the shore line with tags keeping the information on each log. Then you could just drag the log to the shore line with your tractor.

[Robert Long]

Hey Handy Andy!

Do the cows like the taste of walnut water? :D :D :D

Robert

[WDH]

It would be better if they were all the way in the water.  Walnut is reasonably rot-resistant, so you can probably get away with one end on the bank if they do not reside there too long. 

[Tom]

We don't have much access to walnut here.  But we submerge a lot of pine.

Pine fence posts will rot at the ground level.  It's because the wood is continually being wet and dried and that is an ideal situation for rot fungus'.

I would be afraid of trying to store logs half-in and half-out of the water for the same reason.

Total submersion keeps the insectls out of the wood. 

Since fungus' require a small window of moisture, submersion keeps their growth to a minimum.

When we don't have a pond, we sprinkle the logs to affect the same results.  It's not as good, but works for short durations of weeks and months, where submersion protects for years in many instances.

The trick seems to be to keep the entire log wet.

[Handy Andy]

  Burlman, there might be room to swim around the tugboat if it was in the pond.  I use the small pond for logs cause they would get lost in the big one.  Fuzzy bear, good idea.  Robert, yeah the cows must like the water, they'd rather drink out of the pond than drink well water from the tank.  Thanks WDH and Tom.  I thought maybe the log itself would distribute the water through the part not submerged.
  Can anyone explain why a dead walnut tree is brown  right to the bark, with maybe just a little sapwood in spots? 

[WDH]

    Can anyone explain why a dead walnut tree is brown  right to the bark, with maybe just a little sapwood in spots? 

The few dead ones that I have seen were not like that.  It must have had little to no sapwood when living, maybe because it had stopped growing and was shutting down due to some type of stress.

[Kcwoodbutcher]

As WDH said the last several years of it's life were probably "survival" years where it managed to stay alive but not grow enough to put on any sapwood. On the other hand if it was way dead, as in several years, the sapwood probably decayed leaving only the heartwood.

[Handy Andy]

  Ash grows here like weeds.  It is the green ash as the leaves are not white on the underside, but the point is it is full of borers.  Not necessarily the emerald ash borers but plenty just the same.  You can see in the heartwood where it has healed up. 
  Well, the point is would it help these ash logs to soak them in the pond?  Like the
soaking kills the bugs?  I would just as soon the logs got old enough the bark comes
off fairly easily.  No debarker.  Anyway, the walnut log I was writing about was a
yard tree at my Dad's.  Still had the bark on, just died the summer before I cut it.

[WDH]

I would think that submerging the ash in the pond would kill the bugs.  They have to breathe too.

[Handy Andy]

   WDH, when you say submerge, do you mean that I need to weight the logs so they go completely under the water?  I usually just drive up to the pond with the loader and dump them in.  They kind of float, mostly underwater.

[WDH]

As long as they are getting constantly wet, they should be OK.

[TexasTimbers]

I was just throwing some walnut slabs in the Vogelzang and noticed virtually no sapwood in them as well.