maple is a hardwood what to you mean real DW? i might just leave it outside in a bucket for a month and let the water evaporate and then rain and then evaporate.
root ok for the aquarium
- Thread starter allaboutfish
- Start date
Real driftwood means wood that's actually gone through the weathering process. During that time, most of what will rot away does, and only the densest, most rot resistant parts of the core remain. Without the aging process, all of that goes down in your tank.
mellowvision
Seafood Lover
Building on what Inka said, testing your ph for a month isn't going to tell you much at all about what a tree root may have stored within, nor is it any amount of time to really weather the wood.
A typical piece of grey, dried out driftwood you find on a river bed has been dead and decomposing for years. Not 6 months or a year, like 5 years, 10 years. The wood has rotted, let go of it's sap and tannins, and most likely let go of most of the toxins or metals it may have absorbed while it was alive. It has sat, somewhere, being wet and dried and wet and dried, repeatedly for years. Or it has sat at the bottom of a river, for years and then was washed up in a storm. What makes this wood useful, is that it is no longer a nutritious host for mold, fungus, and bacteria, and it has been neutralized by nature.
A fresh maple root is a valuable commodity. The burls in maple roots are often used for making bowls and decorative woodworking. But even for most woodworking, the wood needs to be dried before use. This can be done quickly in a kiln, or over a year or two in a cool dry environment where it is sheltered from the elements. I'd probably find a woodworker who wants to buy it, and use the money to get a piece of actual driftwood.
Or, if you are really hooked on keeping this wood, you could age it outdoors for a year or two and then soak it and prep it for your tank. But you'd want to be sure that you live in, and it grew in a pesticide free area, otherwise you could just have a time bomb waiting.
Trust me, I've got a root I really want to use too. And I soaked it for 6 months before I decided to put it aside for now... and I'm still not sure what I want to use it for. I just don't trust it the way I want to, for something submerged. I'll probably make a terrarium with it.
i put a maple branche strait into a tank before and it hasnt done anything that i can tell. i mean branches fall into rivers all the time and theyre fresh so why doesnt that hurt the river ecosystem?
