You spelled Crape myrtle exactly right! It isn't crepe, as so many try to insist. ;-)

With all of those useful pruned branches, are you topping your trees or thinning them? Just curious.

I can also attest that crape myrtle wood makes great firewood. Years ago at a time in my life I don't really like to remember too clearly, I had to chop up a lot of my own wood for heating and cooking in a Mama Bear woodstove. I was pregnant at the time and also had a 2-year-old, so I was a little limited in my mobility. I found that dead crape myrtle branches - and there always seem to be some in large overgrown crape myrtle trees - especially multi-trunked ones - are relatively easy to chop or saw up, burn well, and are light enough to carry but worth burning. They burn more like hardwood than softwood.

BTW, Clark Howard has pictures of the proper and improper ways of pruning Crape Myrtle trees on his web site.

Clark Howard?? Are you sure that you didn't mean Walter Reeves?

Here is a link that might be useful: Walter Reeves C.M. Pruning

Maybe it's the cheaper way to do it?

Clark Howard?

Sometimes even I can't figure out what I'm saying!

"the cheaper way"~~too funny!!

I was very happy to find a good use for prunings from our crape myrtles. I used them in February to mark newly planted rows in our garden and for staking some plants. Now I have baby crape myrtles growing from the base of the stakes. I just know that if I had TRIED to root them using this "method", it wouldn't have worked.

They do make good stakes. If only I could get them to remember I want them to be stakes, not new trees. Mother Nature is amazing.