growing clear straight yew trunks for sustainable bow stave harvesting ?

[freejutube]

Hello, I'm a new member

I'm searching for information about yew tree cultivation for bows. We can guess that one of the primary preoccupation of the primitive archers was to find straight trunks for their bows. They probably developed knowledge and skills to grow or tend trees specifically for that purpose.

On the internet, I found only rare mentions about how to cultivate yew trees in order to obtain bow staves. They come from a Claudius Loudon's book (1836) and give this hint (not a textual citation) : when planted in masses or under the cover of tall trees, yew trees tend to grow straight and knotless until they reach a hight where they find light and grow more branches. There would be no need of pruning small lateral branches. (I gathered extracts there : http://experimental-prehistory.blogspot.fr/2017/01/how-to-grow-yew-trees-for-longbows.html).

Does someone remember having seen other information on this subject and where ?

Regards,

[Badger]

  Yew takes at least a couple hundred years for a tight growth ring tree big enough to make bows. In your lifetime I doubt you could benefit from growing staves.

[Del the cat]

I think 60-70 years would give some usable staves.
One way would be to pull an existing limb or trunk over until it is horizontal and let the shoots grow up. Once every couple of years tidy it up.
This post from my blog shows what you could get... or you children could get!
http://bowyersdiary.blogspot.co.uk/2011/04/yew-staves-in-tree.html
Del

[penderbender]

I agree with del 60-70 years is enough. But like badger said also your probably not gonna benefit from planting any. I still plant them when i can. Pruning/ manipulating may help other generations though. Cheers- Brendan

[Badger]

I agree with del 60-70 years is enough. But like badger said also your probably not gonna benefit from planting any. I still plant them when i can. Pruning/ manipulating may help other generations though. Cheers- Brendan

  I do like the idea of planting for future generations, just for that purpose. I know yew is also useful for some wildlife and birds.

[LittleBen]

The critical problem with Yew is that the best yew has very thin rings. Since you get one ring per year, there's an inverse relationship between the speed of growth and the quality of the resulting staves. So there's really no secret sauce, just a trade off between speed and quality.

Given at even staves harvested from wild grown trees are very expensive, and they are probably not sustainably harvested, I suspect that a stand of cultivated yew would result in very high qualit, consistent, but also extremely expensive staves.

For example, an acre of paulownia can yield $45,000 wholesale, that's probably at 20 years or something like that, minus the $5,000 or so per acre for seedlings, water, fertilizer. So to make yew make economic sense on a 100year cycle, you would need to net roughly $200,000 per acre. So planted at 500/acre you would need to yield $4,000 in staves per tree. Even at 20 staves per tree, you would need to get $200 for a green stave.

Back of the envelope calculation suggests to me that it would be much too expensive, especially since this doesn't consider seasoning the stave, labor costs for splitting staves (they'd probably have to be sawn to be practical), and the fact that deer eat yew and you'd need big time fencing.

Lastly, you'd have to be able to be confident that there would be a market for yew staves in 100 years, and you also would have no ability to react to a changing marketplace. For example, perhaps in 20 years it becomes clear that the demand for and price of trees grown for construction lumber is skyrocketing, and you could yield even more profit by harvesting your current crop early for pulp and planting some other crop to target the emerging demand.

In short, such a long outlook makes it almost impossible to see any wise investment including the commercial growth of yew staves.

Lastly, let me add that I think it's much more likely that you could commercially grow Osage. It's tolerant of a range of growing conditions, and the faster it grows, the better. The first step IMO would be to identify a columnar cultivar of Osage that would be most suitable for row planting. Also, Osage could have significant commercial value as firewood so you likely wouldn't have to just sell the waste as pulp, you might be able to market it for firewood. Same would go for Mulberry IMO, And mulberry grows even faster.

[Del the cat]

The critical problem with Yew is that the best yew has very thin rings....

I disagree with the above statement...
My experience doesn't back it up and last year I cut some Yew that has grown exceptionally fast with rings that are about 1/4" wide. When it's seasoned in the Autumn I hope to make a Warbow from it, then maybe we'll have a comparison.
I'd say the best Yew has a clean knot free back...
http://bowyersdiary.blogspot.co.uk/2016/07/old-wives-tales-and-yew.html
If you click on the pictures and look closely at picture number 3 you can see the rings are V fat.

Meanwhile back on tpoic, I agree it's good to plant as well as to manage the stuff that is already growing. My problem is I don't own any woodland, but I do a bit of stealth planting here and there 
Del

[wizardgoat]

I know where's there's a few small saplings that I plan on cutting in 20-30 years haha.
I've made plenty of small diameter yew bows that have 30-40 thicker rings in them.
I don't believe thinner ringed wood makes better bows, sure looks better though

[PatM]

Planting trees is always a good idea. If it's ultimately just wasted time for you there's still an upside to it. As long as you're not introducing invasive species.

[High-Desert]

It defiantly worth planting yew trees even tho you may never benefit. I've had issues trying to find a supplier of them. I'm no gardening expert, but pretty decent, but yew are also not the easiest to propagate. I have taken cuttings and had about a 10% success rate. Of those 10%, 100 % died.....I did something wrong.

I've also never experienced thicker ringed yew being any worse than thick ringed other than appearance.

Eric

[DC]

If you plant yew in the open it will get bushy so you have to find a wooded(low light) area that is going to be there for 50 years or so. A lot of yew grows twisted so you have to plant at least double. Most of the Yew growing around here will end up in a haystack pile after they clear cut. At least they don't burn any more so it's in there somewhere. Don't begrudge the guys that harvest it their money. First they have to scout it out. That means hundreds of dollars of fuel. Then you have to get there before the logging company. That means you are hiking through virgin timber with a chainsaw,hammer, wedges etc. Once you cut it and split it you have to haul the staves out so you probably have to make four or five trips in and out. Then you have to try and sell it to a picky bowyer that doesn't like the placement of a knot. I've gone out and got a few small staves that I didn't have to split and it's a lot of work.

[penderbender]

I know where's there's a few small saplings that I plan on cutting in 20-30 years haha.

me too haha quite a few.- brendan

[WillS]

There are a lot of places here in the UK that have yew trees that were very obviously maintained for long straight clean boughs.  I was lucky enough to cut a large amount of it a few weeks ago - it was growing in a school and there were about 25 yew trees. 

Each tree had one large thick trunk, which then branched into a wide T and numerous boughs were growing vertically up from the cross of the T.  Each of these boughs were about 7" in diameter, and when I split them they all split dead straight and gave four staves per bough.  In all, after cutting just a few boughs I ended up with about 20 dead straight staves.

Something tells me that they were maintained for years and years to grow like that, because at the top they were insane - gnarly and twisted and spreading everywhere so obviously the reason to keep them straight had disappeared over the last few decades.

I can think of at least 5 other places local to me where the yew trees have been maintained like this, one in fact growing directly above the grave of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein!

[JW_Halverson]

There are a lot of places here in the UK that have yew trees that were very obviously maintained for long straight clean boughs.  I was lucky enough to cut a large amount of it a few weeks ago - it was growing in a school and there were about 25 yew trees. 

Each tree had one large thick trunk, which then branched into a wide T and numerous boughs were growing vertically up from the cross of the T.  Each of these boughs were about 7" in diameter, and when I split them they all split dead straight and gave four staves per bough.  In all, after cutting just a few boughs I ended up with about 20 dead straight staves.

Something tells me that they were maintained for years and years to grow like that, because at the top they were insane - gnarly and twisted and spreading everywhere so obviously the reason to keep them straight had disappeared over the last few decades.

I can think of at least 5 other places local to me where the yew trees have been maintained like this, one in fact growing directly above the grave of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein!

Heap big juju in that tree!  It literally would have taken up parts of her from the soil as if fed, grew, and lived.  To take that tree and make a bow would be roughly analogous to the story line of the book!

[Philipp A]

Here is my take on it. I have planted 11,000 trees and will harvest none of them in my lifetime. Not everything in life has to be done for profit, but it is nice to leave something for future generations and to know that you created awesome wild life habitat which you CAN enjoy in your lifetime.

So I would suggest, go ahead and plant some yew and other bow species you like and enjoy tending to them so some lucky skunk in the future can get some bow staves from it.

Our natural world is in trouble precisely because everything we do is done from the human perspective and not from a holistic approach that assures for the natural world to continue to exist.

I know a bit philosophical, but hey its just my 5 cents