Ologies with Alie Ward - 5th Anniversary Special! Xylology (LUMBER) with Jeff Perry

Episode Date: October 5, 2022

What’s the customary 5th Anniversary gift? Apparently… WOOD! So we wrangled our favorite sawmill owner/operator of LA’s Angel City Lumber, Jeff Perry – who rescues downed street trees from the chipper and turns them into beautiful planks, boards, stumps and chonks. We cover everything from forest management to 2x4s, wood grain, burls, bog logs, sawdust, tree disease, asparagus tips, salvaged lumber, kiln drying, Westward expansion, Indigenous forest management, cedar whiff, and how working with wood changes your relationship to death. Angel City Lumber websiteDonations went to The Mother Tree Project via this linkEpisode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Bryology (MOSS), Dendrology (TREES) Encore, Mycology (FUNGI), Indigenous Fire Ecology (GOOD FIRE), Carobology (NOT CHOCOLATE TREES)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

Oh, hey, it's the apple peels that your roommate was going to compost, but you ate them because roughage. Allie Ward, back with an anniversary episode ofologies. We are officially 283 episodes in, and as of late September, we are five, we're five years old. And I was thinking five's a big year. I should do something. I should make an anniversary clip episode.

But then I googled customary anniversary gifts, and I realized that five-year gifts are wood. So let's do a wood episode, shall we? Let's lumber up and celebrate with a fresh new app with my favorite sawmill in the world. I have one. And thank you to everyone who has supported this show via patreon.com slash oligies, where you can join for about 25 cents an episode and submit questions. Thank you to everyone who makes sure you're subscribed so you get new episodes and everyone who rates and leaves reviews.

I read every single one, including this one from airbearstiles, who just wrote, I've been a fan for so long, but finally got myself to open this app and write a review. This podcast is one of life's simple pleasures. Thanks internet dad. You're welcome kiddo. This week, xylology, wood. So xylology is a branch of dendrology, and it deals with the structure of wood. It comes from a Greek word xylon, which means wood cut and ready for use, or firewood or

timber, or it means planks or beams. So xylology, lumber, y'all. And I met thisologist in the summer of 2019. It was a dry, dusty July day, right after I moved into a house after living in a studio apartment for a decade, but I needed a kitchen table. And Jarrett and I wanted to make some kind of like live edge table. And I heard about Angel City Lumber, which sources its wood from downed urban trees. And it's in the middle of this industrial district in downtown LA.

It's a sawmill and lumber storage facility. It's this big cavernous retail warehouse just neatly stacked with these thick planks and stumps and slabs. Each one is labeled with a type of tree and the neighborhood that it fell or was cut from. And so we ended up buying a live or natural edged three inch thick, SAML ash slab from Covina and Jarrett sanded and finished it as our dining room table. So I appreciate their mission every day, as do a bunch of local furniture builders and carpenters and designers and woodworkers.

And I emailed the founder and I asked if he would answer a bunch of lumber questions. And I headed there last Saturday afternoon, just after they closed to the public for the day. I was toting my little audio kit wherever is good place. I just want to like sniff everything. It smells so good in here. We sat in the office and we talked about everything from sawdust to tree diseases, two by fours, salvaged lumber, kiln drying, westward expansion, indigenous forest management, cedar whiff,

walnut burls, bog logs, grain patterns and more. So get ready to be acquainted with Timber with co-founder of Angel City Lumber, xylologist Jeff Perry. I've known you for a couple of years. I came in to get a slab, a table slab, fell in love with this place for our fifth anniversary for wood. I was like, haha, this is perfect. I love it.

I mean, anyone that wants to talk wood, they have my attention. Would you call yourself a lumberjack? Who gets to call themselves a lumberjack? I think someone who is in a forest of some kind, maybe an urban forest, felling trees is a lumberjack and I don't know if we can classify ourselves as that because we're not felling trees. We're essentially hauling trees that have fallen or are being taken down or are being taken down because of the disease or they're being taken down because of development, perish

the thought or like whatever reason, but we're not out there with the chainsaw. As much as I think it's romantic, I can't really call our operation lumberjacks. You're not Paul Bunyaning out there in a flannel. Yeah, no, not typically. In Angel City, that's obviously Los Angeles. When people think of Los Angeles, I feel like they don't think of trees. Are you from here originally? I'm not from here originally, I'm from the Boston area.

I'm from Reading, Massachusetts, which is north of Boston. I moved here 20 years ago, actually next two weeks, it'll be 20 years. The customary gift for a 20th anniversary is porcelain dishware, which I did not come prepared with, but in the last two decades, Jeff learned a lot about carpentry, furniture fabrication, and he built an appreciation for different types of wood. As a maker, kind of self-taught for the most part, not necessarily a great one, but a maker. I had a couple of kids, I was in business for myself. My son was a year and a half, no, two and a half, and we were on a hike in Altadena with

our dog, and I saw this tree come down in a storm. I didn't see the tree fall, but I saw it down already, and we were walking by it. As I tell the story, I thought I was a genius. I thought I was the only one to ever think like this, which was like, I'm going to build a line of furniture from this oak, from this tree. It was a huge, co-dominant live oak that kind of splayed in the storm, and I was like, this is it. I went to the ranger and I asked, can I take this tree that has fallen?

He was like, no, you can't, it's a county park, you can't do that. He was very nice, and to his credit, he was very patient with me, but I went back a week later and I saw that the tree had been, to their credit, most of it was still left there to decompose, but there were still parts of it in the pathway that were bucked up. Bucked up? Side note means cutting into logs, just chunking it up. I just had this moment of like, I literally, at that time, had just paid $11 a board foot for oak from Illinois, for this commission, and I see this oak come down and it is getting

thrown away, essentially, it's being mulched. So then I just kind of went down this rabbit hole, like, what do you mean? We just mulched. What do you mean? What do you mean? What do you mean? And then I started doing some research and talking to people and found out that a lot of recycling coordinators around the county are like, yeah, we mulch it.

And then I was like, no. This is unacceptable. So then it started figuring out ways to, you know, I would call tree services first and foremost now, they love trees, you know, and it just guts them when they have to, like, see a tree come down and then chip it and then buck it up into these enormous, majestic tree. So I would call them and say, like, hey, look, if I had a truck and I could come by and take a tree that you guys were felling, they're like, yeah, when can you, like, when can you

be here? Really? I was like, well, I don't have a truck yet. And they're like, all right, well, just like, let's go. And then I started calling some of the design community because I'd worked with some designers and stuff like that as a maker. I was like, you know, if we had locally sourced lumber, would that be something that you'd be interested in?

They're like, yes, we've been wanting to have this kind of supply chain like that. So I was like, okay. He found an investor via a carpenter and woodworker, Laura's on. And that is how the afterlife for downed trees, the heaven that is Angel City lumber came to be. But wait, let's buck up because there is so mulch to cover. When something gets mulched, what happens to it? Like, is there any kind of argument like, but we need the mulch or does that mulch go

into a landfill with dirty diapers and banana peels? Oh man, this is such a good question. So on so many levels, I'm also going to try and keep it brief. So mulch in and of itself is great. It does a lot of great things. It retains moisture, right? It suppresses weeds. The only thing is that there's a couple of things.

When a tree dies, right? First of all, we have, I think, culturally an aversion to death period. So I'm going to put a pin in that. But what happens is we just, we panic and it's a nuisance and it's a liability and it's CYA and we got to get rid of this tree that has fallen. I thought CYA was a municipal term, but I looked it up afterward and I think he just meant cover your ass. So the knee-jerk reaction is get it out, cut it up, mulch it, get it away, right?

So things like twigs, leaves, some element of branches and limbs, sure. Like mulch, great. We can use that. We can use every morsel of a tree. When you have a four-inch diameter, 85-year-old American Elm, please don't mulch the trunk or the larger branches. It's just like, to me, it's a little sacrilege. It's not a little sacrilege.

It's just kind of, it just is indicative of the disconnect we have culturally as humans with trees, at least in the West. So mulch. Let's talk about it. What happens now is every municipality I know or in this area is required to not throw away trees. They're not allowed to dispose in a landfill, nor do they want to. These are all good people.

So they're like, great. They used to be able to bury trees, like bucked up logs. They used to excavate and bury them, and they would decompose. But obviously, with carbon emitting and methane, therefore, it's just like, no. So they put a stop to that. So they mulch. They mulch everything. They mulch, mulch, mulch, mulch, mulch.

But now mulch, it doesn't go in the landfill. Typically it gets utilized back into the community, either on the sides of freeways or public tree wells, or they also have free mulch drops for people in the community. Like, I don't know if you've ever been in Griffith Park, or they have like a, at the composting site, they have like a free mulch pile. I didn't know that. So you're gardening and you're like, hey, I need mulch. Yeah.

I think I purchased mulch recently. I'm going to figure out, why the hell did I do that? Who knew? Yeah. Yeah. So free mulch. Free mulch. But in general, because wood and lumber is something that's so needed, and it's such

a precious resource, that if we have something that is potentially lumber, better to use the thing that's got to get removed anyway than go fell a healthy tree, right? Agreed. When people come here, I love to see their face when they go to the log deck and they see the logs come in, especially when it was their tree that was standing there a day or two before and they come by the log deck and it's like, oh my God, look at all these trees. They're saying, look at these trees, right? Yeah.

Then they see the process of the logs coming from the log deck over to the milling area. Then they see it from the milling area go into the kilns and then from the kilns go to millworks and then from millworks go to either the retail shop or to a project. And it paints, obviously everyone knows wood comes from trees, but they don't think about it. They think wood shows up on a flatbed. Yeah. You know?

Yeah. As I often say, it's like no one looks at the chicken nugget and thinks of a chicken. So the disconnect is so real and it's really cool to see people awake to it here. So I bring that up because we don't think of our trees as living beings, typically. There's very little honor involved in the efficiency of mulching, in my opinion. So again, it's not to say that mulching is bad, mulching is great. But if it's a byproduct to a larger thing, then I think it's a lot more viable. Which is why Angel City has a very hyper-local model.

Part of their mission statement says that the only way to shift an untenable way of harvesting commercial lumber is that every local community produces its own from its own local forest, which can be street trees that have been felled due to development or disease or from storm damage. So what about the lumber that we are used to, the stack of 2x4s that we pick up on maybe an ambitious Saturday morning from the box store? So commercial lumber is typically, for the most part, you know, especially for construction grade lumber, there are forests, designated forests now in Western culture that are secession

planted. So they are planted, essentially, usually for 15 or 20 years, let to grow. And then after the 15 or 20 years, they are harvested. Those trees typically, because of demand, and it's the same forests the world over, but because of demand, they are planted, harvested, secession planted, meaning like once that harvest is gone, they're going back and they're reseeding, they're turning the soil, they're totally new trees. They are typically for free to grow, secession planting means that you're getting rid of

all the underbrush. They don't want those trees to compete for any resources, they want them to grow fat and straight and just pump out boards. So that's kind of where we're at with lumber. And that's why we think of boards showing up on a flatbed, but not as a tree. So then you live in an urban community, or even a rural one, and trees come down and it's like, oh man, everyone's so gutted about this tree that was standing with such a vital part of their life, like maybe it was a tree in their front yard, maybe their kids climbed

on it. Maybe they wept under it, under sad times, or whatever it is, there's a tie, right? I love that tree. But as soon as the tree comes down, it then becomes a nuisance, not necessarily if it's a tree that you're tied to, but my point is when that tree comes down and it's your tree and you are tied to it, you have a connection to it. So then when you are saying, oh, we have a lot of people here that have a tree come down, they're like, we just want you to make something from it, especially for me.

Please make me something of my tree. But there's a deep connection to that tree. So if people were connected to all trees, like they are connected to that particular tree, then I think we would be in a much different headspace and heart space than we currently are and not just trees, but it would be for food. It's the same thing, like farm to table or ethically sourcing meat, right? I mean, it's all different things when you have an animal that you've grown and have a relationship with and it's like a whole different ball game.

Daniel Schmockenberger did this really cool talk essentially on how the plow was kind of the beginning of when agriculture, the agriculture revolution was like, okay, now we have a plow that we need to have ox run to make sure that we're having enough grain planted for our civilization. But before that, there was an animism. Everything had a spirit. Everything was a soul and everything. But that switch from, okay, but I really need you to like, I really need you to make this

crop. So like, let's go start yoking the ox, start whipping the ox, start binding the horns of the ox. It just changes the relationship. And I think that where we're at now currently is like a holdover from that kind of mentality of, yeah, it's a tree. We need some boards. Let's go.

Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Yeah. So anyway, I think by like our whole thing is like reconnecting to an animism, if you will, that is, you know, trying to really take a look at the trees in our community in the urban forest. You walk by them all the time.

You drive by them all the time. You get shade. You get your kids under them in the summer, in the LA summer under them so that they protect your kids. Get acquainted with a tree, you know? Talk to a tree. Be with a tree. Touch a tree.

Think about a tree. In the canopy. And then when the process of garnering a gift such as wood from that tree, you think about it differently. And I think that's the big shift that needs to happen with lumber. Did you read the giving tree as a child and saw your face off? Because that was like, I was ready to walk into the ocean in like fourth grade. I was like, oh, I mean, but it's not far off.

It's not. It's spot. And that's why it's a killer. Yeah. Because we know it's right on the money. Yeah. Just a side note. So this children's book was initially rejected by a bunch of publishers until it finally

was released in 1964. And it features the relationship between a boy and an apple tree. And as a kid, he climbs the branches and then later sells its apples, cuts limbs to build a house and a boat. Does he need a boat? And finally reduces this apple tree to a stump. Doing it for me feels like your grandpa spent his last seven dollars on your birthday present and at the same moment you got kicked in the stomach by a donkey.

This book hurts me so much. Trees, I'm so sorry. So what happens to neighborhood trees that have come down anyway, maybe taken in their prime by condo development or a neighbor's fence or a weevil? Did you find it was difficult to get your hands on these trees that were going to be mulched? Did you find more and more? There were people who were saying, well, I have to take down the sycamore.

Part of it fell. So can you come take it? Yeah. So believe it or not, it was relatively easy to find people that were willing to give us tree logs. It was relatively hard to get them to understand, hey, we needed a certain length. We needed a certain diameter. We'd end up with a lot of brush or small diameter or tiny short lengths.

We're like, awesome. Thank you so much. I love Charles, how to make wood from this. But for the most part, people were super jazzed about giving tree logs to us. As far as the process went, Charles Derosa, my partner at the time, he researched and found this method of parbuckling, which is essentially pulling up next to a log with a trailer and on steel ramps and a winch rolling a log up onto a trailer deck. So that's how we did it for the first few years.

Now cranes are involved, which is a lot easier most of the time. But anyway, the sourcing was for the size we were starting out was actually relatively easy. Luckily. So I didn't know until I came here that you can't just take a big log and cut it into big pancakes and say, we're good to go here. There's a drying that has to happen. You got to store it for a while.

How does something go from a timber crash to a table? Boy, that's a great question. How much time we got on this interview? I'll make this kind of, I'll make this as like the most abridged version possible. But once you have a viable saw log, as they call them, if you're going to commoditize it, a tree that has produced a section of itself and you put it on a mill. Typically on its side, there's typically three cuts, kind of like if you were to think of it like a butcher.

So there are planes on boards. There are rifts on boards and there are quarter sound boards. So essentially, if you're looking at the end of a board, you're looking at the end grain. So the end grain of the board is going to basically show the rings of the tree, the growth rings of the tree. So as you're looking at it, terrible example, terrible example. As you're looking at it, this is better, excuse me, hold on. Good thing that you got wood samples around.

Turns out this is one thing I got, okay. He grabbed some finished perfectly angular planks and the first one was planes on. You can see the growth rings traveling. This is a lot of pines, a lot easier to see the growth rings on conifers typically. So these are traveling with the edge, right? You can see they're almost lateral on the edge. Yeah, they're almost like a horizontal stripe sort of. Thank you.

Exactly. Again, that was planes on, which is the most efficient use of the whole log and it's the most affordable cut and it has commonly what's called cathedral grain. So imagine zebra stripes kind of in the shape of popats that are nested in each other. That's cathedral grain. But a different cut of wood is rift sawn. Planks cut from logs kind of in a radial pattern from the center. Rift sawn is this board here where the growth rings are almost at a 45 degree angle, right?

To the face. And this one being quarter sawn, these are vertical and perpendicular to the face. Quarter sawn is typically, everyone's like quarter sawn, quarter sawn or rift sawn is fancy. The grain pattern, you get a little more figure. But as far as building goes, planes sawn is simply just as good. They're just different grain patterns. So in choosing how you're going to cut a board also plays into the next step, which is drying.

So correct. You cut boards and you're like, okay, I got a board off the mill. Let's build something. And you're like, no, that's actually not how it works. If you build with wet material, if you're joining boards and stuff like that, they are going to off gas water as they do over time slowly. And as they off gas, they're going to warp. So a tree is typically, depending on the species anywhere between 65 to 70% water, just like

some other creatures that we're familiar with, like me. And the cellular structure of wood, there's basically two kinds of water. There's free water and there's bound water and the cellular structure of the wood. So free water is the water that is within the cell walls. So it's just nestled within the cell. Imagine free water kind of mingling around a room, but the bound water is trapped in the walls itself. So of course, the water roaming the cell, not within the wall is faster to depart.

That evaporates relatively quick. So if we cut these boards, we put them on little sticks. In a few months, all that free water is going to evaporate from the wood. That's cool. Three months, not that long. However, the bound water, which is the water trapped in the cell walls, is way slower to come out, way slower. They say typically it takes a year per inch thickness of wood to air dry.

So and that's the bound water. It's also typically like a northeast upper Midwest. That's kind of a trope out here. It's not that way. It's faster because it's drier and it's more arid. But anyway, that's the general rule. So if you're air drying wood, you have to wait a long time before you can build with it.

There is now kiln drying technology where you can put it into a dry kiln to speed up the process. Just because you speed up the process doesn't mean you can do it haphazardly. It is an exact science like baking. You can mess up wood real easy in a kiln. But if you play your cards right, it speeds up the process, maintains the stability of the wood. Then you can build with it.

But building with it, as a lot of people know, is also a thing. You have to then, now you have a rough sawn board. Not like the picture perfect finished boards he's holding, which have had kind of a lumber yard glow up. These have been surfaced and planed and straight and easy. Those look on point. On point. They come off the mill and out of the kiln, they look like, ooh, like what do I do?

It's like rough and warped and all these things. So you have to make it into, just surface it through various machines to dress it so you can make it buildable. So it's plumb. Everything's plumb as they say, right? Yeah. I love watching YouTube videos where people are doing renovations and they shit talk how nothing's plumb.

I'm like, probably if I build something, nothing would be plumb. It's always the other person's work. It's always somebody else. Ah, this person. Yeah, man. It's not plumb. Next I install studs every 16 inches or so, making sure they're plumb or vertical. And you know, when it comes to the different kinds of trees that are in urban environments,

let's say versus rural, is it so different in, let's say LA or San Francisco or Boston as it would be in environs just outside of it? Like I know we've got a lot of live oak, we've got walnut, black walnut here in Southern California. We have a lot of sycamore and eucalyptus, but I don't know if those are, if those are native. Yeah, no. These are, this is great.

So do you, like as far as species go? Yeah. Like what, do you find that what you are using as a maker is different than what you're harvesting and building from? That's a great question. Why? Thank you. So, yes.

So, okay. So I'll answer this in two parts. The first part is what species, like are there any species that span kind of any urban community in the, in our country, let's say. There are real tried and true urban trees that are resilient that, you know, typically cities don't put a lot of money into, it's not a judgment, it's just, there's no money. So they're not putting it toward the urban forestry division. So they plant trees that are resilient.

They don't need much care. So London Plain is like, you know, that London Plain is like the stereotypical urban tree that is like, man, they're beautiful, they grow, they're resilient, they have a good shade canopy, et cetera. So whether you're in New York, San Francisco, wherever LA, you'll find a London Plain. So there are species like that, but I will say it is very easy to see by the age of the trees of an area, which trees were given 20 or 10 or 20 years, like the go-to urban trees to plant.

They're like, it was like carob, very like early 80s or, yeah, totally. See the carobology episode, which is, yes, a whole episode dedicated to carob trees and the not chocolate that they produce, and I'll link that in the show notes, but yes, you probably haven't seen a lot of this really beautiful, russet-hearted carob wood around, which sucks because it's beautiful. And there are 30-year-old carob trees getting cut down all the time on suburban streets. We're using a lot of species that aren't typically on the commercial market because they have been deemed culturally as those aren't wood trees.

Those are canopy trees, those are ornamental trees, they're resilient, whatever, but they're not wood trees, right? It's interesting because most of those resilient trees that are getting planted as urban trees were somewhere, somehow at some time, a tree that civilizations built themselves on, you know? Yeah. So no, it's not a cherry log from New York state, but a canary island pine, everyone's like, what is, I don't know what that is, and then you go on the street and you're like,

that's a canary island pine, that's a canary island pine, that's a canary island pine, they're like, oh yeah, oh, those, yes, those. So I'll give you an example. So this tree is so resinous. It's just a natural resin, people call it sap, but it's not actually sap, that's more of a deciduous thing, but these conifers have this pitch, like a really thick, gooey pitch, and it just oozes out of this wood. So everyone's like, oh god, and like, I'm not building furniture in this, I'm not doing

this. Well, that's fine, you don't have to build a Windsor chair out of canary island pine. However, the tree is incredible, and that natural resin in it, why use pressure treated wood? Why pump all these chemicals into a piece of lumber so that when you're building your deck, it's ground contact and doesn't deteriorate? When nature has already made a species of wood that is pumped full of resin, natural resin that stands up to years of like earth contact and moisture, you know what I mean?

It's like, we're not thinking outside the box. So now we're like, no guys, use this for ground contact lumber, ground contact. So usually, especially designers, they come here and they're like, you got to tell me about these species. I don't know anything about these species. And then we say, okay, so here's some best use cases for eucalyptus, or here's some best case uses for California sycamore or coast live oak. Real fast, coast live oak is a LA-based native.

So sycamore is also a LA-based native, a riparian tree, so it's along riverbeds. I didn't realize sycamore was native. I was in Griffith Park, I was at trails once, and all of a sudden, heard a crack and a boom, and a sycamore, half a sycamore, just split in two out of nowhere on a sunny Sunday afternoon. It was quite a thing to see, everyone was fine, but I was like, oh, wow, I've never seen a tree fall in the park, but it did make a sound, but I was like, and I wondered, I wonder what they're going to do with that now, like who comes and they put some caution tape up, but I don't know, I wonder if that one ended up here.

It could have. But when it comes to the model that you've done here, does this happen in other places in the country? Oh yeah, for sure. We are definitely not the only people doing this at all. They're all great people, but there's like New York City slab, there's wood from the hood in Minneapolis, Epilogue, LLC, and Oregon Bay Area, Redwood, and the Bay Area. There's Harvest Lumber, I got the shirt on right here in Austin, Texas, gosh, there's

a lot. There's a lot. Jeff emailed me later with a list of folks that he wished he mentioned, writing, there are a slew of people across the country and continent and world who utilize urban trees as lumber currently, and there are a few others right here in Southern California that he says he would be remiss not to mention like San Diego Urban Timber, Lumber Cycle in San Diego, Alasaw in Los Angeles, and Street Tree Revival in Anaheim. And I'll list all of those on my website so you can just gawk at all of their pretty

planks knowing that such gorgeous timber was saved from maybe just decomposing in a forgotten mulch mountain. What about different woods for different applications? I am not a carpenterist by any manner of speaking, what kind of wood is good for floors? People are making a lot of things out of pallets from behind dumpsters. What are different types of wood best suited for? So good. Okay.

Boy, that's a, it's kind of a wrap sheet. I'll speak as generally as I can, basically for flooring since you proud of flooring. We use typically various species of eucalyptus and coast live oak. Those are our two kind of go-tos. Why? Because they're very hard and dense, eucalyptus is also very close grain, it can hold up to high foot traffic. They're also not necessarily the most stable woods as boards.

Wood is going to be roughly five eighths to three quarter inch thickness, no problem. Or even if you're making an engineered like a wear layer, which is a, you know, roughly four millimeters thick, no problem. So they're perfect for that. And again, the durability is great. So those two, those are species that typically on the commercial market, people are like, what am I going to do with this? But like they are perfect.

I mean, these, these are, I'm pointing to the floor because these are, look at me like this. A eucalyptus floor. Who knew? Jeff. Takes a lot of foot traffic in here. But anyway, so that's one. We have a lot of makers and furniture makers that come in here.

There are certain species that are really great for joinery and making furniture. Shamalash, like your table is a, is a perfect one or California sycamore. The native is also a really big fan favorite for that. We have a lot of American Elm, Chinese Elm, Siberian Elm. Those are fantastic. There's a native, there's a native black walnut. That is also great. So there's, that's a whole other, like a, it's like basically like a deciduous machinable

stable species. Those are great for making. We use a ton of pine, which, you know, everyone has this preconceived notion about pine. They're usually thinking about softer, like Eastern white pines. Again, this is like a cultural holdover. By the way, I love Eastern white pine. But anyway, the pines that we get here are, again, are really robust trees from other parts of the world.

So Aleppo pine is a Syrian and Lebanese, you know, it's endemic to those areas. Super dense, especially for a pine, like it's a hard wood. It's not a hard wood, but it is a hard wood. Same with Italian stone pine, canary island pine, as I said earlier. We use those for a lot of big chunky landscape timbers. Okay. So we have a lot of terremoto landscape represent. They love calling those fixtures chocks as deemed by terremoto.

Terremoto landscape and my friend David Newsom at Wild Yards Project.org also do a lot of beautiful native landscapes and they use a lot of reclaimed materials and I'll link them on my site because their handy work has personally transformed my hill and my backyard of invasive weeds into what's now a pollinator habitat and a hub for critters. But back to inside and what was under our feet. What is hardwood, by the way, because you said they're hardwood, but not hardwood. That's a great question. So hardwoods, hardwood, as in one word, hardwood is typically a designation for a wood from

a deciduous tree. Oh, okay. And softwood is typically a denomination for a conifer. I had no idea. Typically. I had no idea. So when someone says that they have a hardwood floors, let's say, my apartment has hardwood floors, does that mean it's going to be a walnut and not a pine or is that just totally

a different, oh, okay. Yeah. It could be, you know, like obviously like the, yeah, a walnut, like the commercial, the white oaks and the red oaks, beach, maple, you know, all those, those are hardwoods. Ha-ha. Does it ever pain you to see certain woods trend one year and then be like, oh, everyone rip out your white oak floors. They're so last year.

Like, does that ever just kill you? I love all wood. I love all trees. So, but I get less, I get less miffed about the trending from a tree standpoint and way more from a, from a human standpoint. Yeah. Like the walnut, like every woodworker and every one at a mill in the country is like, I know you love walnut.

You know, it's not walnut's fault that is beautiful and all the things, but it's just like, guys, come on, we got a branch out. We got a branch out. Yeah. Hey, it's so ingrained. I mean, I'm like, geez, I'm going to stop leaving alone. But would you say that was it? Has there ever been a wood that's really surprised you that you're like, who knew this

was such a good one? Can I, can I? Yes. I'm going to, I'm going to go off. Yeah. So eucalyptus. Okay. Buckle up, boy.

Howdy. This ties in culturally again. You asked about eucalyptus earlier. So eucalyptus is endemic to Australia. I'm going to backtrack for a second. Okay. People, woodworkers, woodworker people are like eucalyptus is crap. Oh, bad rap.

Yeah. Crap. Crap wood. Crayon can't do anything with it. It's crap. Unstable. It's crap. Cell collapse.

Crappy. So that has just been anyone you talk to, like eucalyptus. Oh, well, you can't use, like, you know, you see people around town and that a tree comes down or eucalyptus comes down and they know what we do and they're like, ah, well, too bad. Cause you can't easily, well, it's just right. Like, yeah. Well, actually wrong.

Cause what we have kind of really gone down the rabbit hole with is making people see that eucalyptus is fantastic. Oh. And while I know from an ecological standpoint, there's a, and I don't claim to be an ecologist and I don't claim to know like all the, all the ins and the outs from a flora and fauna standpoint locally and all that. It's allelopathic, meaning like there's not always opportunity for other plants to grow under its canopy and stuff like this.

Everyone hates this tree. No. Okay. Except for koalas. Except for koalas. Yeah. Except for Australians of any kind. The human and the more than human world in Australia, I love eucalypts.

It's in the West. We hate them and they're invasive and they're all these things. So quick, very quick, little abridge version of how it got here. Bring it on, dude. So American settlers, mostly of the European settler ancestry variety in their DNA wood, wooded areas, woods, right? Woods for energy via fire, woods for building materials as wood. Wood is wood, wood, wood, wood, wood, right?

Post, you know, 13 colonies or a country now and it's just harvest your pants off with wood. And manifest destiny up through Iowa, which is the forest has been so decimated because of, you know, again, moving westward. Now, this is where the US Forest Service is emerging and there's like talks like, hey, what are we going to do here? Yeah. And there's this talk of like a timber famine, potentially. So around this time as well, the transcontinental railroad has got, by the way,

I'm just a quick little plug here. There's an author named Jared Farmer who wrote a book called Trees in Paradise. That is incredible. But again, I'm giving you the very nuts and bolts version, but transcontinental railroad at this point goes from East Coast to Iowa, stops in Iowa. And everyone's like, we got to get it from Iowa to Frisco, okay? Because it's not transcontinental until it gets to the front of the Frisco. So great.

But there's a looming timber famine and train tracks need ties and they need split rail fencing and we don't have any trees to do it with and supply for everything else. Right? Just so happens that this is around the time of the gold rush. So not only that, but now you've got all these people from the East Coast to the Midwest going like, get some gold. So they're going hellfire out to the West Coast, right? Well, not everyone settles in the, you know, by the plassers.

They all kind of, you know, they come down the Central Coast and Southern California and there's not any trees. The native landscape is brown hills and chap roll and occasional live oaks and riparian sycamores or white alders in the, in the elevations, sidebar. People have been living here for millennia with no trees, just fine. Yeah. Yes. In the Southwest, there are many river valleys that have cottonwood and sycamore and

willow and mesquite and there are varied biomes and forests, but the climate and the ecosystem is less densely forested out west than back east. But on my website, I'll link a short documentary about indigenous ecology called Spirit of the Trees, continuing traditions of Southwest tribes. And there's much more on land management and forests in the indigenous fire ecology episode with Dr. Amy Christensen, which I'll link in the show notes too. But I digress. So the European settler mindset is like, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees, trees,

trees. How can people survive out here? So they're thinking about the timber famine and they're thinking, we have to settle down here and we can't do that without trees. We don't have any firewood. We don't have any building material. We don't have any, anything. So we got to get some trees planted and not only that, but they have to grow fast and

we have to harvest fast. Oh man. Right? It's a tree. Trees don't grow fast. It's the one thing they don't do. Right? We need some faster snails around here.

It's a snail. Let the thing grow. So they're like, what's the, what's the microwave version of a tree? Pretty much. Now this is, you know, and to be fair, this is after they've also decimated all the redwoods and cedars in the Pacific Northwest. Mm-hmm. Right?

Just chewing through them. In Northern California. It's chewing through them. Wood locusts. Lumber locusts. Lumber locusts. Like just, I can't even, my heart. So anyway, they don't know exactly who and, you know, brought them in, but basically

Americans started visiting seed banks in Australia. They had learned, they had already done some plantings in Europe with rave reviews, etc. So they're like, we got to get our hands on some of these eucalyptus seeds we're going. They got some. Now also seed banks weren't as sophisticated, so they didn't have a great grasp on which species. There's over 700 plus species of eucalyptus in Australia. So they were like, you know, it's hard to keep track.

In the U.S., there's roughly 200 plus. That's still a lot. Still a lot. It's confusing. But anyway, the point is, is they, they brought them in through San Francisco Bay, started planting these eucalypts. Okay. Now there were like a lot of people that were fervent about growing these.

There was like flyers everywhere. There were people were taking investment opportunities like, look, you want to make some money? This is a surefire tree. These trees grow 60 feet in six years. And by the way, this blue gum eucalyptus, eucalyptus globulus grows the fastest. Like it's a rocket tree. So we are in luck. We got it all figured out.

They started, they started planting eucalyptus the entire West Coast getting investment money. We're going to make that timber. We're going to make that money. We're going to get that railroad gone. And what happens? They harvest them after 15, 20 years, which is typical for deciduous trees. Eucalyptus is a myrtle, a little different ballgame. And it's also, it grows interlocking grain.

So it doesn't grow quite the same way, which is also like these variables that no one was really thinking about. So they're harvesting them young and they're milling them up, sawmills, and they're letting them dry, air dry. And they're warping and they're checking and they're splitting. And they're like, oh, what? And people have like put all this money into it, right? Now this tree that was going to be a savior, people were using the oils and they were fixing

their fevers and they were like this magic tree. Look at this tree. We have trees now went from that to this tree. It's invasive. Everywhere now, it's shit-ass wood. It ruined everything. We can't harvest any. So now there's like forests up the coast, right?

And now they're just like, well, I can't use that. So that's the holdover mentality. People still have a grudge. Still. They're like, yeah, that one did me dirty 200 years ago. 200 years ago. Yeah, something. And it really makes you think about like culturally, like we pass on these like perspectives and

these perceptions. I always wondered how we got so many of them. I've got one of my neighbors got one over my backyard. One day it might fall on my head. I don't know. That's nice. Good shade. The crows love it.

And I love the crows. We have a good relationship. But when you are building with it, even though it did that warping and buckling and the cross grain, how do you manage that wood and make cool stuff out of it? Great question. And this is my, one of my business partners, Todd is in charge of drying has been up until now and he has done some amazing work and I want to give him a shout out because he's kind of changed the way people think about eucalyptus in this area because, you know,

the way he's dried it. So Todd Cooper, shout out. But basically when you harvest early, like that 20 years, eucalyptus, and like I was saying, it grows seasonally, like every growth season, it switches the direction of the fibers growing upward. Wow. Which, until it's a really, really mature tree is really squirrely for wood grain. Turns out, if they did a little more research, and I know hindsight is 20-20, I'm not trying

to be like, I know they were just doing their best. No internet. No internet. No internet, right? But there's people in Australia, whether it be they indigenous or settlers or whatever, they know. They're like, look, you got to let eucalyptus tree grow a hundred years and then you can harvest it and it's great wood.

And by the way, there's all these different kinds of species and they all have different purposes and whatever. So anyway, the way we do it here is, instead of air drying, we can air dry some species like Carumbia citridaeura, lemon scented gum is like one where you're like, you know what, actually you could air dry this one, it's not a big deal and it comes out nice. Blue gum, which is, there's a ton of blue gum in California, is one of those ones that it's tough to air dry, but what we can do, they didn't have then, is kiln drying technology. So we have dried kilns.

So we can control basically what was happening is the off gassing of water was happening too rapidly. And so it just everything buckles. Typically what you do is when you saw lumber, you let it air dry for a while until all the free water is gone. Yeah. Okay, let's shout out to free water. And then you put it in the kiln to finish it off and that's the bound water.

Yeah. I know what that means. Yeah, I listened to a podcast about it, this one. So now with kiln drying technology, that's typically what you do with this particular wood. What we did, again, shout out to Todd. He was like, you know what, I think we need to get this off the mill, like right off the mill, like literally a board comes off the mill and you run it to, you sprint to the

kiln and get it in the kiln. And you maintain that moisture so that it off gasses more slowly. And in the kiln, you start off very low and slow, low temperature, low and slow time, and let it off gas slowly. So you're controlling that off gassing and then you can dry it way more stably. So we have that advantage of kiln drying technology. But when it's done that way, it's still tricky. But if you get it right, boy, is it awesome.

And blue gum we use for decking, we use for chunks as well. But we can get decking boards, perfect pristine decking boards out of blue gum eucalyptus now. The flooring, we use blue gum as well, we use lemon scented gum, we use red gum, we use sugar gum. Even sugar gum. Sugar gum. So yeah, so it's great.

So that's my species du jour. I love eucalyptus now. Yay. I will hug one. Can I ask you some questions from listeners? Please. Okay. Yeah.

That's a good one. Because money does not grow on trees. Technically, United States paper bills are printed on linen and cotton. Now you know that. But each week, we donate to a cause of analogous choosing because we like to try to make a difference. And this week, Jeff chose the Mother Tree Project, which is a nonprofit that funds long-term research to identify future forest management practices that will help our forests

remain productive and diverse and resilient as the climate changes. And it's led by world-renowned forest ecologist, Dr. Simard, who wrote Finding the Mother Tree. And Dr. Simard, Jeff says, is an idol of his. You can learn more at mothertreeproject.org. That's linked in the show notes. And thank you to sponsors for making that donation possible. Okay. I saw your questions.

Let's answer them. Trevor Doty had a great question. Everyone asked you this, I'm sure. Why do we call them two by fours when they aren't two by four? This is a great question, Wousers. So they were, once upon a time, two inch by four inch. As framing shifted from balloon framing to balloon framing, it was a type of framing where you still had studs traveling vertically on a wall, but the floor system was a little

different. There were cavities on the exterior walls that, again, hindsight being 2020, fires would, once they started, they would come up through those bays, so they spread way too fast. So that's why balloon framing kind of like, the one and a half by three and a half, which is a nominal two by four. That means we call it something that it's not. Like how Pannouf means new bridge, but it's the oldest bridge in Paris, or a friend whose phone contact is still their maiden name.

Because you've known them since like 2006. Anyway, two by fours. Came about, I believe, because of industry, a switch to stick framing, which is the current standard for framing houses, because of the plantings, because of the succession plantings, and I think the efficiency, they're easier to carry, they're just smaller. And if done 16 inch on center, you still have the stability, they're like, why are we wasting lumber? We're making it harder on carpenters and all the things, framers.

So as far as I know, my knowledge is that it was a combination between framing technique and also industry, just wanting to be more efficient. But you can get more out of a tree. So that's good, right? Yeah. Okay. Okay, I like them now. Elijah wants to know, Elijah's six year old.

Not a lot of six year olds listening to the podcast, given how much I swear. Elijah's a six year old? I know. I'm like, I'm sorry for the swearing. But my six year old wants to know why wood is hard when other plants are soft and bendy. Oh, wow. So the wood is essentially, you got cellulose, I want to say roughly half of wood is cellulose. Then there's hemicellulose.

And then, which is like just a different molecular structure. And the last bit is lignin. And the lignin is like the tie between cells. It's like an intercellular binder for all the woodness. There's lignin in all kinds of plants. It's just, I think, the concentration of it in wood, I think, is what gives it its... Makes it tougher? Yeah.

I feel like there's got to be a lot in the end of an asparagus stalk. You know, when you get to the end of the asparagus stalk and you're like, can't chew that? Got to be. That's the cutoff. Got to be. Cellulose is a polymer made of glucose and it gives wood most of its strength. And lignin is a polymer made of phenols, which are lightly acidic aromatic compounds.

Lignin acts as a binder or a matrix for the cellulose. And hemicellulose is also a binder, but it's made of a bunch of different sugar compounds. So I'm sorry, what's happening in asparagus? I almost cut that part of the interview out because I was like, Ward, why are you bullshitting about asparagus right now? When I looked it up and it turns out I'm a genius, I found a scintillating publication, the Journal of Food Packaging and Shelf Life, which had the 2020 sensual study called longitudinal analysis of lignin deposition in green asparagus by microscopy during high oxygen modified

atmosphere packaging. And it confirmed my suspicions, saying lignification is the most important factor that negatively affects quality of fresh green asparagus and limits its marketability after harvest. Lignin doesn't soften when cooked. So unless you want your dinner guests to gnaw logs at your table, you got to snap the end of the spears instead of cutting them. And in terms of their pee, there's nothing you can do to stop the asparagus acid from breaking down into sulfur, but you can keep a candle in the bathroom or encourage your

friends to rejoice in having a functioning body with working kidneys. And for more on that, you can listen to the Nephology episode, which will teach you that transplant recipients get to keep their old kidneys. And some people just have like a few extra kidneys in the back, like your uncle's old Mustang under a tarp in the driveway that he just can't seem to get rid of. Just keep it there. Ira Gray wants to know, how rare is spalted wood and does it kill the tree? And can you tell a tree is spalted before you cut it?

I want to know what a spalted mean. What is that word? Great one. Spalting in wood is a fungal characteristic. You'll see, they're typically, at least around here, black lines in the wood. Do you want to see if I have any around here? But there's also spalting that is... Oh, here's some.

This is spalting in the sycamore right here. Oh, come on now. Oh, so like little, like darker, darker lines. Oh, okay. Yeah. There's, say, a typical spalt, but there's also like rust-colored spongy looking. Like you were to take like a sponge painting on a wall kind of thing. There's also hot pink.

I know when I first started doing this, I remember like seeing wood that was dry and like, who is drawing on the wood? But it's a fungus. I don't believe that these fungi are harming or helping these particular ones. So a mycorrhizal fungi, fungi at the root system is like the support network for a lot of different species and interspecies and all that stuff. So those fungi are like, you know... Super important.

Super important for trees. There are other fungi that can kill a tree really fast. And I don't know the ins and the outs of all that. But spalting is, it happens around here a lot to our sycamores, our silver maple. And I believe it has to do with, yeah, the decay over time as they're just kind of declining. There's more spalting happening in the wood. So spalting is just a little bit of fungus giving a fun pattern. And apparently you can spalt lumber on purpose and shove it into a bag to get kind of moldy.

And one website I looked at called Suncatcher Studio advises that ingredients that contain nitrogen or organics and sugar will help speed up the spalting process. This can include horse manure, fertilizer, and leaves. They continue, I have had especially good luck using two cans of beer. One can of beer you pour on the wood. The other can you drink. I like this person. They seem fun to have a spalted log with.

We have a question about burls that Neymar and Jer wants to know. What's the deal with burls? As a kid hiking in the woods, I heard stories of majorly cool trees being cut just for their burls and the rest of the lumber just being left to rot. It made me think of ivory and rhino horn poaching and frankly still horrifies me. But do some species of tree have more burl, like walnut has more burl, right? What is a burl? There's sprouts.

Oh. Yeah, there's sprouts and there's sprouts that don't necessarily continue to shoot. So redwoods, everybody loves redwoods. No argument there. Everyone loves redwoods. Everyone. So basically those are lignotubers. They have those.

You ever see at the base of a redwood tree a bunch of little shoots coming out. And typically when a redwood tree comes out, the root system or the root ball typically has a huge burl, not typically, but often has a huge burl at the base of the tree to which woodworkers are like, save the root system, save it, save it, save it. And yeah, it's a bunch of sprouts that didn't take. And it's the same for any species. I had no idea. Ingrown sprouts.

So a burled tree can also mean a stressed tree. Insect infestation, brush fires and bad weather can make the tree do the dendrological equivalent of panicking, making a ball of sprouts in case its main trunk can no longer function. So when you see burled wood, just think about a tree reading about an impending tragedy and making tons of babies. Now burls make me sad. Oops. I thought this was a great one.

Fiora Lilly wants to know what classifies a tree as old growth and what can we do to protect old growth forests and why are they important versus young growth? So when you were talking about forests that are just like planted and then that's the new growth, right? Yes. There's a lot of different classifications and I get confused. There's old growth. There's new growth.

There's first growth, second growth. I believe that the different growth stages are harvest from a given organism. So if you plant a tree and you cut it down, that's first growth. But old growth, I think as is typically talked about, are trees that were in a forest that was not harvested that are like pristine, really tight growth rings and are just very old trees. Yeah. Okay.

So let's do a quick rundown on that. Old growth forests haven't been logged and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations says they are naturally regenerated forests of native tree species where there are clearly no visible indications of human activity and the ecological processes are not significantly disturbed. That is an old growth forest. About a third of forests in the world are old growth and they're mostly in Brazil, Canada and Russia.

Old growth forests are hanging on to a lot of carbon and species. Now second growth or new growth forests have been harvested and they're growing back. Now how long does it take for a second growth or new growth forest to be an old growth? Well, it can take a hardwood forest in the US between 150 to 500 years to regain old growthy characteristics up to thousands of years for other forests. And most forests in the US and Europe are on their second lap. The old growth long gone to practices of colonization. I was recently visiting my cousin Nate who showed me a table he built from this densely

ringed old growth wood. And this lost log was cut 100 years ago but was just recently dredged up from a chilly lake by the same timber company. My cousin up in Montana was talking about how logs would fly down the river, old, old logs sink. It would be anaerobic enough where some of those logs get dredged up and then you have this really, really compact old growth, old, old logs that have just been in water. Does that happen?

I mean, can water be a preservative in that case? Yeah. And it's beautiful. And it's often like really dark wood. There's also bog logs. I know like in the UK, like in the bogs in the UK that logs that have been submerged for, yeah, hundreds of years and then they pull them up and they mill them in a lumber and it's used for like gorgeous, gorgeous furniture and stuff like that.

So just bog logs. Bog logs. Someone get boglogs.com. Yeah, totally. No, I think it is because, yeah, Fiora Lilly submitted a few questions and one of them was, what's the deal with bog oak trees? Yeah. So there you go.

Yeah, there you go. They had this question too. Are there any tree species that we should straight up avoid buying to stop encouraging logging of that resource? Is there one that is like lay off this one, everyone? Because it's such good lumber, that kind of thing? Yeah, or just it's harvest is maybe not done well or it's like let these mahoganies or ebay or something just like keep chilling in a forest.

Yeah, I think forest management is a whole thing that deserves a lot of brain power to put our minds back on how to do it, right? Our current system is again, I think it's a whole over from a post industrial like mindset which is just devoid of our relationship with forest, with trees. Robin Wall-Kimmerer, there you go in bringing sweet grass and talking about the black ash basket weaving or harvest. There's no conservationist like don't ever touch the trees or anything like that. But there's a participation and there's an honor and there's a dance and there's a reciprocity

as she would say. For more on Dr. Robin Wall-Kimmerer, see our biology episode about moss linked in the show notes. What an episode. I love her. We love her. I think until forest management can get back to reciprocity, I mean, I would say all species are in danger.

Just as any non-human being is in danger of what we're up to, you know, I mean, other certain species of animals that we shouldn't hunt more, but yeah, I mean, just like we need to just overhaul our whole mindset. Yeah. Again, pre-industrial revolution tree harvest was the world over, indigenous communities, the world over for millennia and as far back as we can go, people built with wood. But the way that the forest were managed was like a wood lot. So you would essentially, you would cut down a section of a wood lot managed by the community

and this is pre-land ownership. So this was not anyone's land to own. This was everyone's land in the community. And they would harvest a section of the forest, coppice, they'd be cut at the base and let it resprout. And they would do that on 20, 15, 20 year increments. So the next year you would go to the next section, cut that while this one's growing back, you go all the way around and you've got wood lots that trees are thousands of

years old and they've been participated with. There's an incredible book by William Brian Logan called Sproutlands. And he actually did this whole deep dive into the history of this and he also talks about how flora and fauna, the ecology of a, of a participated in wood lot just booms and there's like three times the amount of plants, insects, animals in a forest that is being participated with humans. This seemed bonkers to me. So I surfed the bibliography of Sproutlands and then literally a few hours later realized

that I had been deep in paper such as late Mesolithic and early Neolithic forest disturbance, a high resolution paleo ecological test of human impact hypotheses and the potential wall of humans in structuring the wooded landscapes of Mesolithic Ireland, a review of data and discussion of approaches. Both papers from 2013, which seemed like just a banger year for publishing stuff about Neolithic forest farming. But yes, coppest growth, according to the book Sproutlands is not a single thing, but a synthetic ecosystem in which human participation is a key.

Far more species of plants, insects, birds and other creatures inhabit such a mixed landscape than would live in an untouched woodland. And for more on this, you can see that book Sproutlands by William Brian Logan. And to Pollard is to cut certain trees at about head height so that grazing animals can't reach the young shoots that sprout from that cut surface while coppicing is cutting closer to the ground so that the new shoots of the tree grow from that stump. And yes, I looked it up and you can coppice an apple tree, which gives me hope for the giving tree, even though most apple trees, as we learned from the dendrology episode,

are grafted. But if the giving tree just grows into one that makes shitty, malformed apples full of bitterness and worms and gets left to hell alone, I'm happy for the giving tree. I'm happy for it. Plant any species, if that's the mentality. But in the current system of commoditizing for commodity sake, and I get it from a demand standpoint, these woodlots, this is when there was a half a billion people on the planet and now there's eight billion people on the planet.

It's a different ballgame. But I think we can still get back to that mentality and do forest management a lot differently than we're doing it. What about reclaimed wood and barn wood that is being taken apart one by one? Yeah. Even if there's demolitions, the idea of going and trying to take as many beams as possible and reuse it, are people doing more of that? And is that lumber accessible to people?

Totally. Are there good places to look for that? Yeah. There's places here that are awesome. One of them has gone out of business, the Reclaimer at Tarzana, which is a bummer. There's also a tree line in Frogtown, Habitat for Humanity, the Restore. So there are places that do that around here and they're awesome. And I think that is a great idea.

But it's all systems. It's all like how we live in an economic system. So how can you, from a process standpoint, do it viably? And these people have the relationship with a contract, a demo contractor. They have a schedule. They're like, OK, the demo contractor is like, great. You have these three days to extract all the timbers that you want. They go in, they do it, they have a whole facility set up.

And that way, by that process being streamlined, it's not crazy expensive. People can go to that reclaimed lumberyard and they do and they use all of it. I love that. Right? I love that. It's incredible. Does it ever piss you off as someone who has a live edge table from you, beloved, the most cherished piece of furniture in my house?

From Covina. Yes, a Samalash, which I didn't know that was a species of tree. Does it ever piss you off when you see things cut to look like live edge that are not live edge? That pisses me off. I have a feeling. Can I be real right now? Yeah, that's messed up.

Don't do that. That's what we were talking about, about the kind of like, oh, this is how it's supposed to look. Come on. Well, yeah, like get a grip. Yeah, I know. I figured whenever I see that in the catalogs, I'm like, I bet that pisses him off. Get a grip.

Claire Nurk wants to know if you have a favorite smelling wood. Oh, man, that's a tough one. I mean, Deoddar cedar is the Himalayan cedar. It's endemic to the Himalayas, but that's the most common urban cedar that we have here. Boy, oh, boy, that's my favorite, I think. So smelly, so good. So smelly, so good. What about the worst thing about your job?

What sucks? What's the most frustrating thing? The worst thing? I I sound so annoying, but I really love it. I really, really love it. Oh, there is. Oh, there is. That was a disclaimer.

OK, OK, you must have like one toenail that fell off years ago from under a log or something. You know, yeah, plenty. OK, but but this one, but this one's more actually, I could really use the help of anyone in our community that's listening on this one. OK, I'm all ears because I can't figure out. So we we get the biggest bane of my existence at my job is we can't use.

We can. We haven't figured out yet how to use every single morsel of our trees. So the obviously we make lumber, but that's that's roughly 80 percent of a log. That's I don't know that might be inaccurate, but I'm going to estimate roughly 80 percent of a log is made into lumber. Well, what about the other 20 percent? That's a lot of what we have. We cut a lot of logs in a year. The sawdust we have solved, thank God,

through LA compost, we give them all of our sawdust and they use it for browns for their for their food waste to make for compost, which is awesome. But our slash, meaning the stuff that's kind of like we don't know what to do with this, we we've started splitting firewood and having it for community, like restaurants and wood ovens and stuff like that. But it's not like a streamlined thing yet.

And the rest of it we bring to a mulch for mulch. And we're like, yeah, I guess it's fine. But like, I know there's a better way to do this. And it just crushes my soul. Coasters. What about coasters? We could do coasters. A lot. That's a lot of coasters. But they're like pieces of wood like this.

They're like weird pieces. Yeah, you're like, I don't even know how do I dry this? How do I cut it? What do I do? There must be carvers, whittlers. Yes. A brigade of whittlers showing up. The Whidler Brigade. There's got to be one. But so maybe a little bit of hive mind is that that 20 percent

Yes. What to do with it. Yes. That's the worst thing. Yes. OK. I mean, maybe 15 percent. But yes. OK. Follow them in Angel City Lumber and give them some ideas. Also, you can gaze at their gorgeous stumps and slabs and such. What is the best thing about the job?

Man. Can I give a few? A couple? Yeah, of course. Our team is like, there's 15 of us here and they are like. Angel people. I don't know. I like this would not. What we've accomplished already and we have a long way to go is like, it's just as testament to like the people that are just like, let's do this.

Oh, that's so nice. They're so incredible. All every single one of them and the ones that have worked here that don't any longer. Just incredible people. So that's one. But obviously, I think the main event is obviously that I feel that we are contributing to a shift and mentality to the more than human world around us. And I think we're contributing to a new sacred

and we're contributing to our community. That's the best part is like really communing with a living being and honoring that being as. You know, living on. And like I mentioned earlier, like to put a pin in that to the aversion to death. Yeah. The culturally, I think we have is like, we get to look at death head on and and share it as opposed to like be scared of it or look the other way to it.

We deal with death every single day. And we get to deal with it in a way that's really beautiful and reverent. And I think that that's like by far the best part, you know, and also smells real good. Yeah, smells great. Death never smells so good. Death never smells so good. You know, that's like you can put on the coasters.

Thank you so much for doing this. Thank you so much. I'm Joy, an absolute joy. So ask soft, hearted people, hard questions because there's a good chance that they've been asked before and they love telling you the answers. Again, Angel City Lumber, follow them on social media, link to the show notes. They only sell locally to LA, but I listed a bunch of other companies that Jeff mentioned, plus studies and books that we talked about at alleywar.com

slash oligies slash xylology. Happy wooden anniversary to us all. And thank you, Jeff, for joining us. Thank you to everyone at patreon.com slash oligies for supporting from before we were ever even launched. You can join for a dollar a month and submit questions. Merch is available at oligiesmerch.com. And thank you, Susan Hale, for managing that and so much more.

Thank you, Noel Dilworth, for all the scheduling help. Aaron Talbert admins the oligies podcast Facebook group. This is from Bonnie Dush and Shannon Feltes of the podcast. You are that. Mercedes Maitland and Seekrend Regis Thomas of Mind Gem Media make the Smologies episodes, which are short 20 minute episodes that are classroom safe. Kelly Ardwire helps with the website and she can make yours. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music.

Emily White of the Rotary makes professional transcripts and Caleb Patton bleeps episodes, and those are up at alleywar.com slash oligies dash extras for free. And the man who treats us all so well and edits these episodes is the one and only Jared Sleeper, who had a mullet trim and a birthday this week. Happy birthday to someone who makes the planet better. What a guy. And if you stick around until the end of the episode, I tell you secret. And this week, tonight, Jared decided to make some applesauce from scratch.

And he peeled the apples like a normal human. And then I asked him to not throw away the apple peels because I made a salad of just the apple peels with some chunks of cheddar cheese and some walnuts in it. And a few years ago, I would have hesitated longer and not had this self assurance to say, please save that garbage. I'd like to eat the garbage, but there's just something about the text for a peel. I went for it. No regrets. My favorite part of potato is the skin.

But if we're being honest, a potato really only has two parts. It has the inside and the outside. Also, I eat everyone's pizza crusts. I don't even care how well I know them. I'm like a dumpster rat who can drive a car. OK, bye bye. I respect wood. I revere wood. I'm considerate of wood.