I live in desert country where wood decay is not much of an issue. I know of 70+ year old western juniper fence posts that are still in place and rock solid. While decay is not much of a problem, termites can be. I survey staked some areas about 12 years ago, and every stake was eliminated by termites.

When temperatures allow, I've been replacing some lodgepole rails on a fence around my yard, and I've encountered some posts that were near suspended in air by the rails with the bottoms beavered off by termites. I have heard that charring the section of wood that goes into the soil can deter those toothy bugs. It's rumored to be something about a dislike for chewing on near crystalline carbon or burnt wood.

Anyone know if this is fact or fiction. I knocked down about 20 western juniper trees in the forest this morning, and will char the bottoms if it's indeed worthwhile. Anyone know?

creosote may be what your looking for

Can't pick that up in a hardware stores anymore. Maybe I should clean the chimney.

California over the last 10 years or so, has been going through an expedited replacement program for their power poles... I've done a bunch my self over the last decade.

Most of these replaced power poles that by the way are still in use date back to between the 1930's to the 50's.

Check with your local power company, they'll usually let you come in and cut the old poles into sections and haul them off for nothing.




Phil

I would like to cut some lodgepole pine for fenceposts but it wouldn't last long enough to be worth the effort. Finding a good treatment is a trick these days thanks to the EPA. They have it backwards. You can treat 1 post for 50 years with creosote, or you can treat a bunch of 5 yr posts with something that won't last. You get 10x more of the latter in the soil.

We never had any trouble with termites using osage orange for fenceposts. It wouldn't rot, either. Tough on tools like chainsaws, but about as good as RR ties for corner posts and the like.

Plenty of homemade creasote formulas online. We used to just soak the bottom few feet of posts in a barrel of used motor oil cut with diesel.

googled this-

5 gallons of coal tar roofing or driveway sealer, 5 gallons of Diesel Fuel, 5 gallons of used Diesel oil, 2 lbs of feed salt Stir well with an old shovel.

Might work best to dissolve the salt in the diesel fuel before mixing in other ingredients.

I wish I had some Bois'd arc (?sp)- Bodark - Osage Orange. Cedar lasts good down here.

30 gallon drum of used motor oil parked right next to the hole.

Dip post and "plant".

Move on to next hole.

Good to go.

ps

Do you know why posts rot?
It's because the ground is trying to grow it.
That's life.
See?

Bois D Arc when cut green has never been worse on my saws than post oak etc....

But when dry.... I have a gunstock out of it... heavy and tough....

We have one that was a corner post and older than.... when we bought the place in the early 60s... it was pulled when the fence was rebuilt 15 years ago.. builder put it back in said it was better than a cedar....

Yes, wish we had Osage, but it's about a 1000 mile run for me to pick up a load. Obviously a very dense wood, as it has the highest heat yield per unit weight of any wood in the US. I have not seen a heat yield assessment on our mountain mahogany, but it might be right up there. It for sure turns the teeth on ones chainsaw blue. Despite its density, it seems to decay rapidly, and one never finds a straight section either.

Our best post material is western juniper. I have no knowledge on how Utah juniper holds up. Lodgepole pine will near decay before one can get it in the ground.

Back east, one could wear out three post holes with black locust.

I've helped rebuild fence before, set new corners, we use hedge around here, bois d'arc for some of you others, or osage orange. The 70+ year old posts you'd pull out of the ground were just as solid as the new ones we replaced. It sure isn't fun running a chainsaw through a bunch of them though.

The nice thing about hedge posts is you only need to cut them once in your lifetime, as to the original question termites will not eat charred wood, it will still rot.....Russ

Blanket: Thanks, that was the question. When our fire restrictions are over, I'll give them a char.

I know that if you use steel T-posts, you won't have no stinkin' termites...

Redneck: An interesting side bar. I was visiting some ranches out on Kona a few years ago and noticed near universal use of polywire electric fences to contain cattle. With the caustic acids from the volcano and their rains, a steel post and wire will last about 3 to 5 years there. I saw remnants of several t-posts with holes eroded clear through.

Has anyone ever used roofing tar/asphalt to coat and seal the buried portion of the posts? Seems like this would protect from both rot and insects, and since the tar isn't exposed to UV, wouldn't it last? I think it would work as protection from rot, but I'm not certain about insects like ants and termites. Could do the charring first and follow up with tar.

TAR??? I can hear the green-weenies positively GASP with horror...


But - hey, it works for me.. .:D

in Ohiya, we use locust too, same treatments.

we had posts soaking in used oil from the tractors 24/7,, on our/the farm .... NEVER rotted.

I am a Fence Contractor and also own a Post & Rail Mill. Charring does work and been used for decades here in Montana. Larch works the best up here. Green of course. Old timers say they will last 40 years or more. Much better than using harmful chemicals too. I am thinking of selling a line and targeting the posts for gardeners.

We are careful to use the yellow cedar, and not the red cedar down here - red won't last. The yellow comes up like a bush, instead of a tree, so ID is easy before you cut.
Old timers said to cut in Dec, Jan, and early Feb for the best posts - and to de-bark them as soon as practicable.
Yellow is more crooked - but lasts


Hmmm - sounds like the Clintons, huh?

When I was a kid, my dad would get a $50 timber permit every year and we would take off in two farm trucks to the Snowy Range (Wyoming). This was always one of my favorite chores since we spent about half of our time there fishing for brookies, and the rest cutting trees for posts. It took a lot of posts to keep up the fences on a 24,000+ acre ranch. On the way home, a week or more later, we would drop all the tree sections at a friend of Dad's in Wheatland who had a post maker, sort of a giant pencil sharpener type of contraption, for a small fee. When we went to pick them up, eventually, he would have them all spaced with dunage, and when we got them to the ranch we also stacked them spaced with dunage as well, they need to be completely dry for the next step--months later--often we would be cutting the next years before the previous years were all processed. At the ranch we had a trough made of two barrels welded end to end -- not half circle barrel halves, more like 2/3rd barrels so the opening on the side was somewhat smaller than the widest part in the middle. We had some home-made tongs that grabbed a post well too. There was a chemical, IIRC it was called "Tanna" that had copper napthanate and CCA in it. You mixed this stuff one gallon to 20 gallons of diesel. Wear good gloves, glasses, and keep some water around, because while the mixture doesn't seem too bad, if you get some of the tanna on you straight it burns like hell. We also added some used motor oil to the mix when we had some to get rid of. One of my other chores when I went out to feed the horses, rabbits, chickens, bottle calves, gather the eggs, etc. etc. was to every other day take the posts (about ten or so)that had been in the trough for two days out, stack them on dunage, put some more in the trough, make sure there was enough treatment to cover them, and weight them down with some big rocks or block so they didn't float. I think CCA was some of the stuff that the EPA cracked down on, but the copper napthanate is still easy to come by. I don't know if there is such a thing as the concentrated stuff to mix with diesel anymore, but I'm sure that even if you did use tar, copper napthate, and or motor oil, diesel would be good to thin the mix and help it penetrate better as well as be an inexpensive way to get more preservative. Also setting those posts in dry Quickcrete and wetting them in or just waiting for the weather to do it for you would also be a deterrent to bugs and help keep the preservative where you put them and sets them really tight to boot. Even if too costly for a big ranch, it wouldn't take that much for a few dozen posts.

here on this place i have larch posts that were soaked in pickling salt that have been in the ground over 100 years. like they are petrified.

With all due respect, nobody in America gives-a-chit enna more what Californians do in regards to policy.

We also made a deal on about ten miles of abandoned power line poles that crossed the ranch once. The good treated end that we wanted most was on the bottom still in the ground though. But these were nice and big and more suited to some heavy duty corral posts than fence posts -- my dad thought he hit a gold mine at first since he got them for nothing and they were already cured and at home. They are set deep too. He started inventing contraptions to pull them out with -- we had a John Deer crawler and a Farm All loader. the Farm All wasn't big enough to pull 'em and the crawler had the power but pulled sideways not up. I remember him spending most of a week building this big "A" frame out of I beams, but it collapsed on the first pole. After a couple more attempts at beefing it up with the same result (well I think we did manage to get three or four poles out along the way, he said, "Hell with it" and we got the rest with a chainsaw treating what we cut off and leaving the best part in the ground.

Creosoted or diesel fuel with motor oil soaked post or a treated post. Treated post are costly. Old tel phone poles work great and are treated.

I use cedar for posts, Eastern Red Cedar. I can show you posts that have been in the ground for 70 years, and are still sound. Although I have used them as soon as cut them, I prefer to cut them in the winter when the sap is down, and let them dry for a few months. The redder the post is, the longer it will last.

Close. Bois D'arc.

At least that's the spelling in SW MO

Hedge won't rot it will shrink away over time , like 100 years

The past two years I've been tearing down and replacing an old fence on some land we purchased. The majority of the posts on the old fence were black locust. Most of them were still solid. The few T-posts scattered here/there on the fence had rusted so badly that they were breaking off.

Yep. The less sapwood (white wood) the better. You want the post to have as much heartwood (red wood) as you can get,

Shou Sugi ban, Japanese Cedar charring to help preserve wood from fire, rot, and insects. Looks very cool too, on siding

i would think spaying the bottom of the post with bed liner would work too. (the stuff for pick up truck beds like rino liner)

When I was a kid, someone gave my dad a bunch of well dried 16' 4x4's. He decided to make fence posts out of them. They were heavy suckers and very hard to cut in half. We planted them and then tried to hang wire. It was impossible to get the staples in. We'd bend 3 for every one we got in. We finally gave up and pulled all the posts out. Dad found out later that they were black locust. The guy gave them to Dad because he couldn't get nails in them either.

Black locust is supposed to be the longest lasting post wood available in the US but you'd better get the wires up before they dry. Once they do, you'll never get the staples in.

Just started some black locust from seed. I think I'll plant them in the appropriate spots, and then wire on the rails. As a kid, the saying was locust could wear out 3 post holes.

Black locust is readily available here and used as much or more than anything. It is also the very best firewood here, which is where all of mine gets used.

yes, and the same goes for black locust as well.

for poor folks w/a local supply, slow growth post oak & other members of the white oak family will last a surprising long time. the heartwood is what holds up and lasts. in the white oaks, the wood cell pores are occluded, meaning they are full of minerals. in the red oak side of the family, the pores are open, vastly reducing service life.

black locust is far better, but given the difference in prices, well, an astute small farmer always went with the post oaks collected from rocky hillsides with thin soil.

when i am sinking posts that i want to stay, i coat the bottom in roofing tar. i do this for pressure treated wood as well. i doubt a termite would drill through that.

In this part of the country, the (western) red cedar won't last - where the yellow will.
Just my experience.
Steel will last many decades, if you keep them out of the alkili meadows and bottoms.