The Buckets by Greg Cravens for November 19, 2011

What a crappy thing to say.

kid eating tree hehe

Carnivorous trees? Little yard of horrors. Feed me Seymour.

Where DOES a tree get tons of mass, anyhow?

water makes up lots of it but carbon, from the air, makes up a lot of the mass too.

..it soils the ground…

tangle tree escaped xanth

Is this guy getting senile?

hmm

Thanks, Brickbuilder. You’d think the adults of the family would know……oh, right, educated in an American Public School™, I forgot… :D :D :D

She’s not a tree expert, Larry!

LOL xxx

Thanks, Strod! Very informative… takes the mystery out of it a bit.

Darn right. If you’re assumptions are not challenged here, then you aren’t reading all the words in order!

Oak has a density of about 50#/ft^3. Tree in our yard that fell on the house was 3.5 ft in diameter at base and 1.5 ft in diameter at the 55’ point. – For first 55 ’ trunk average diameter ~2.5 ft. Est trunk weight: 55 * 50 * 3.14159 * 1.25^2 = 13,500 lbs. And that was not the smallest tree in the area!

Thank you Stod and Phil..But we all know that’s Charlie Brown’s kite eating tree. A tree that also eats anything else that falls within its grasp. But not the kids. The kids help grow in other ways.

Your average tree sucks in ~50 lbs of carbon dioxide a year. Most of that is lost when the leaves are shed, but ~22 lbs goes into making that year’s ring of wood in the branches, trunk, and roots. Otherwise, your avg tree is ~28% water.

In other words, most of the mass is pulled out of thin air.