I agree with Wiley
Much better practice to cut and harvest ,prune some suckers for arrows and come back and harvest again
Around here if you take a stave size chunk out of a tree , it is more likely to die than heal , and even if it does heal it is messed up enough that its of little value for anything!
My experience is a split tree is a dead tree may take a while but it's coming soon .
I am also with Pat on this being the wrong way to go about drying a stave .
You folks play with this all you want , I am moving on to other things .
Guy
