.. wrote:

I have some land that has open space that I plan to plant trees on for
eventual use in my shop. I enjoy working with maple and was wondering if
silver maple is any good. It is the fastest growing of all maple trees but
when I read up on them, their downfall as a tree is that they are brittle
and limbs snap easily. Would this be a problem as well when working with
it in the shop?

Dunno, but it's an interesting question, so I went googling.

http://www.fs.fed.us/database/feis/p...derations.html

Sounds like the tree is a bit hard to manage for useful timber. You have to
have stands large enough to keep sunlight from falling onto the boles in
order to get clear lumber. When harvesting, you have to clear cut big
stands to avoid the same sort of problems.

The trees are brittle and disease prone. They really want to be alive, so
after you butcher one up for lumber, the stump will continue sprouting for
years, wasting your space with weak, useless wood.

This site

http://www.cnr.vt.edu/dendro/LandownerFactsheets/

has some handy quick glance factsheets showing the relative merit of the
species in its database for various purposes. The two maples listed (red
and silver) both get a 4/5 for growth and a 2/5 for timber value.

Yellow birch gets a 3/5 for growth and a 3/5 for timber value.

White oak gets a 2/5 for growth, and 3/5 for timber value.

Black walnut gets a 4/5 for growth and a 5/5 for timber value.

Well, that lead to a lot of other interesting surfing, but I never quite
found what I was looking for. I'm sure there are "so I have some land,
what do I plant?" sites out there, but I didn't google one up.

Based on this little jaunt into googleland though, I don't think I'd bother
with silver maple if I had a big hunk of land and wanted to plant some fast
growing short term harvest timber trees to feed my own shop. Soft maple is
the off brand vanilla ice cream of the wood scene in these parts. It's got
better working qualities than poplar, and it can be pretty, but mostly it's
about as exciting as a trip to the bedding department with SWMBO to pick
out new pillowcases. If I were going to grow trees for slaughter, I think
I'd look elsewhere.

YMMV.

--
Michael McIntyre ---- Silvan
Linux fanatic, and certified Geek; registered Linux user #243621
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