Many of the legacy radiata pine and blue gum plantations in the Adelaide Hills were planted decades ago and, while some of these may not have been maintained to forestry industry standards, there is still a significant amount of valuable timber to be found in the trunk of a 35-year-old tree.

Admittedly, after years of standing dead out in the unforgiving Hills weather, many of the trees we’re dealing with have suffered a certain amount of degradation and rot and won’t be suitable for milling. But a tree still contains a considerable volume of biomass, so we’ll still fell them and they’ll be set aside for chipping and eventual conversion to biochar.

However, trees are pretty resilient, and we’re finding that just as many have retained enough structural integrity to contain a large volume of good, viable timber.

As part of our project, Treecovery has used its Commonwealth BSBR funding to purchase a Hardwood Mills Australia mobile bandsaw mill, which we now have up and running, to process the significant number of radiata pine and mixed eucalyptus logs being extracted from bushfire-affected properties around the Adelaide Hills region.

But we’re not going it alone on the milling front. We are also using our funding to engage and support local mill operators, including our good friends Paul Finbar McCarthy and Heath Cockram at Nirvana Timber Co. We’ve also partnered with Mike Perry from Treemate Arborists, from whom we hire a Lucas Mill when the log/s exceed our bandsaw mill’s capacity. This gives us the versatility to mill logs of almost any size to your specifications – boards, slabs, posts or whatever you need.

_{Finbar from Nirvana Timber Co. milling up some pine logs on his Lucas Mill, to build solar kilns, which we now use to season our milled timber.}

Apart from the pines, we are also targeting individual, high value trees from bushfire-affected properties – introduced species like Oak (Quercus spp.), Ash (Fraxinus spp.) and Elm (Ulmus spp.), and non-endemic native species like Silky Oak (Grevillia robusta), eucalypts like Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans) and Flooded Gum (Eucalyptus grandis), Ironbark (Eucalyptus sideroxylon), and many others.

If you have a fire-affected tree that you would like to have removed and/or milled, get in contact with us to arrange an evaluation.

We’re now set up to do custom milling jobs for you. Whether you’d like to bring us your log/s or pieces of timber and have us cut them to the dimensions you’d like, have us bring the mill to you and saw the material at your location, or choose timber from our considerable stockpile and tell us what dimensions you’re looking for, we can do it. Send us a message via our contact page and we’ll organise a time to catch up and chat about your specific requirements.