Oak Tree Limb Downed In Early Snow - Fall 2019

A couple of weeks back (the day before Halloween), we had a snowstorm that came on while many of our trees had almost ALL of their leaves on the branches and limbs.  The photo at the top shows some of the trees and how there are still TONS of leaves on them.  It also shows a big limb that came off of one of the big/mighty Oak trees that we have in our yard.  

Those two things go hand-in-hand.  The heavy, wet snow on trees that were still carrying all of their leaves caused a bunch of tree damage in our neighborhood.  I worked hard to clear as many of the low trees as possible of the snow (using my blower), but this is the damage that we incurred.  Some of our neighbors lost similar branches and I saw one tree crack right in half up the block.  

That limb might not look like much, but after the snow melted I started to cut the thing back up so I could get it out of the yard.  It was all alive and therefore HEAVY.  Full of life (and water).  Too bad, right?  

I cut a cross section of the limb about half-way-up to see how old just this little limb was in terms of age.  Check that out below.  How many rings do you count? 

Do you count the light AND the dark rings?  As separate years?  If so, I count right around 46 years.  Yeah...Oak Tree grows S-L-O-W!  46 years!

Check out year 15.  Big year of growth, right?

If you count *just* the dark ones, I see quite a few less years.  More like 27 years old.  In this case, it was year 9 that had the BIG jump.



Either way, this is a slow-growing tree.  And now that it is down, I'm going to split it up and put it on the rack.  Once I cut some of it open, I'll measure the moisture in it and watch as it ages for a year.  Maybe it will be ready to use next Winter?  Oak takes quite a while, I think!