What's the Deal With Burls?

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Spalting is just a little bit of fungus giving a fun pattern. You can spalt lumber on purpose and shove it into a bag to get kind of moldy. Ingredients that contain nitrogen or organics and sugar will help speed up the spalting process. This can include horse manure, fertilizer, and leaves. I have had especially good luck using two cans of beer. The other can you drink. They seem fun to have a spalted log with.

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 website

Donations went to The Mother Tree Project via this link

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Other episodes you may enjoy: Bryology (MOSS), Dendrology (TREES) Encore, Mycology (FUNGI), Indigenous Fire Ecology (GOOD FIRE), Carobology (NOT CHOCOLATE TREES)

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Sound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam Media