Growing Trees for Firewood | Coppicing | Smallholding UK
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- Опубликовано: 8 фев 2025
- Today on the smallholding I am showing you how I am coppicing an area of young woodland for the first time for firewood production.
Nothing gets wasted all the brash and smaller branches will be used for woodchip or making bio-char. Check out my bio-char videos for more details.
#SmallholdingUk #NoDig #Smallholding #SelfSufficiency #Homesteading #Smallfarming #Growyourown #Planting #Sowing #Vegetables #Softfruits #Fruit #Coppicing #Firewood
Great video. I could watch them all day
Thank you
Pollarding sound like a better option if you have a lot of deer pressure. Looks like you have a great fire wood system. I'm planning on doing something similar.
I did decide to pollard an area a few years ago, you can see it in my Smallholding tour video, but I didn’t like the look of it lots of shoots grew out sideways instead of straight up and it just looked really odd, I think it might take a good few years for a first cut pollard to start to look like you expect one to look like if you know what I mean🤣
@@SmallholdingUK I'll have a look. Just found your channel this morning. I grew up in the Netherlands, where pollarding is very common. Still don't know what I'll be doing. We are busy buying a place in the south of France.
So now I'm soaking ideas I find on the internet. Fire wood autonomy is on my list!
Well good luck with it mate 👍 I love growing my woodland it’s a long old job but I love everything about it
Yep, do it every two years in our small 10 acre wood. This year will be mainly dead ash which died from the ash die back. I have about 5 yrs of logs in dry store so this stuff will hopefully come in about 6yrs from now. Good video.
Thank you mate 👍
Ash die back is such a shame, I planted 1000 ash trees like 15 years ago and nearly lost the lot 😢
I did not expect this video to be so interesting, but it was. Well presented as usual but packed with useful information, thanks. I'm still searching for land to buy, but keep losing out, probaly given up on prchasing a house plus smallholding in same location, so back to land plus house nearby!
Thank you 👍
Don’t ever give up my friend, we went to lots of parcels of land and got outbid every time for 10 years then we stopped looking because it was so frustrating and upsetting, I thought it would never happen then a few months later my wife just happened to see our plot advertised in the Oxford mail paper and the rest is history
Try miyawaki planting and see what happens?! You might get some speedy growth for a few years and enough to then copies sooner….. Not seen anyone doing that yet for coppicing for firewood so COULD be great right? !
I have watched a few videos on it, it makes sense really the trouble is the deer head straight for any thick areas so it could encourage them even more 🤔
You will want to plant alder as a nitrogen fixing species on that built up part of the land to improve the fertility.
Really informative, thanks. Can I ask a couple of questions; do you not chop your logs in half? The reason I ask is I have a wood stove in the house and spend a lot of time chopping logs in half and quarter, assuming it helped speed up the drying time. Am I wasting my time? And that tree you coppiced, how old was it? Really enjoying your content, keep em coming. All the best, Martin.
Hi Martin, the trees in that area are about 10-12 years old, there all on the small side I think because the ground is very stoney and dry there
If I have logs thicker than about 5-6” I do give them a split, I don’t mind chunky logs and find at that size they still get down to at least 20% on my moisture metre
Glad you like the channel 👍
Very interesting. How many trees would you cut to provide a year’s worth of wood? When you cut a tree, how long does it take to regrow and provide wood again?
These small ones probably about 100, after the first cut the roots are now established so regrowth is quick, I’ll probably cut again at about 8 years for small round logs
What trees are you coppicing? For firewood I use hazel and willow as it's fairly quick to regrow.
I’ve got lots of hazel, sycamore, silver birch, and ash but unfortunately most my ash has got the die back
I have a few willow as well hybrid fast growing type and I might do a few more cutting from them this year
@SmallholdingUK same, my ash gets to about 20 foot them starts to suffer.
Hazel's my favourite tree. Beautiful, quick and easy to grow.
Yeah I love hazels their so versatile
In terms of efficient use of your work time and energy, it would almost certainly be more efficient to cut the stems to a manageable length (6-8 ft) and haul the stems to your storage area and cut to length there. Cutting it all to length at the felling site the way you demonstrated means much more time spent handling the pieces.
I don’t think there’s much in it to be honest, I suppose it depends on the kit you have, I just use a wheel barrow and it’s hard to get lots of lengths to balance whereas I can get a good high pile of cut logs in it
But I’m only going about 100m in any case so it doesn’t really matter
I also have quite a bit of time through winter as my gardening work slows right down
I have done lengths many times before as I have a big electric cut off log saw that I use sometimes
pollarding makes more sense inthat it allows you to have all sorts of animals perusing the woodland without damaging the wood supply - free roaming hamsters, migrating wallabies, sheep, pigs and more
Yeah I agree I did pollard at first but the regrowth was really weird at least half of it was horizontal and it all looked really strange so the following year I just coppiced
I still have a few pollards and I may try again when the trees I’ve planted in the last few years are big enough for their first cut 👍
@@SmallholdingUK Our ancient forebearers would have used every scrap of land for some purpose. Pollard woods mau have had pigs, sheep, goats, deer, bees and cattle geazing, plus wild herbs and murshrroms. Horizontal was totally ok. now it is not so essential to use every piece of land, but still
Don't remove branches you don't burn, either heap them or use a chipper. You might want to return the ash to the wood and use it as fertiliser.
Wood is a bad fertiliser. It might enable the soil to retain moisture. I tend to be sceptical to biochar.
Using wood for heating might be more expensive than using fossile fuel. It just feels cheaper since the cost is spread out.
Yeah I do use my chipper if I’m not using the branches for poles for something or leaving in piles for wildlife
Heating with wood really doesn’t cost me anything much as there all my own trees grown for this purpose, there’s some cost of course, fuel, tree guards and my time but I love doing it so I don’t care about any cost
Thanks for your comment 🙏
"A forest grows on a fallen forest". For woodland, wood is a great fertilizer. Scepticism is great, but don't hide ignorance behind it. Your estimation of the expense of using wood for heating is hilariously misguided.