Self-Sustainability Tangent – Part 9 – Coppice

Let’s talk about some nice, long, hard wood. Sorry, hardwood.

The coppice is divided into five parts for a reason, and for the same reason, it would actually take five years for it to reach its full potential.

In medieval times, this is exactly how they grew firewood. They did not have chainsaws, and cutting a trunk as thick as your forearm is way easier than one as thick as, ehm, trunk. It also dries quicker and is easier to handle allround. So trees were either pollarded or coppiced, with firewood being cut and bound into faggots for transport, then dried, and subsequently used for heating and cooking.

The difference between a pollard and a coppice is mostly the height at which the trees are cut. A coppice is cut almost at the ground level, and a pollard is cut at shoulder height or higher. In both cases, the goal is to get a tree to branch out and create several upright trunks. When these trunks are then cut, the remaining stump creates new ones again. Some trees deal better with being coppiced (hazel), some deal better with being pollarded (basswood), many just do not care that much, and many others are not suitable for this at all.

Almost all softwoods are unsuitable because they will not survive the technique. The sole exception is yew, which was sometimes coppiced for bowstaves, but not very much because it grows extremely slowly, and it was usually cheaper and easier to plunder the wild forests (end of a tangent).

In our self-sustainability attempt, it would be best to plant most of the coppice with fast-growing poplar hybrids. I get ca 1 kg/m² on average with difficulties and suboptimal maintenance, and Google tells me that 0,7 kg/m² yearly on average is essentially the minimum. Therefore, I conclude that 2000 m² coppice should easily produce over 1,5 tonne of firewood yearly on average, and that should be enough to keep one human in a small, well-insulated domicile alive all winters and comfortable most, at least where I live. In colder climates, a bigger coppice would be needed, and vice versa, of course.

On the very north end of the coppice, I think it would be good to plant one-two wallnut/hickory trees, and a few hazels for nuts. And throughout the coppice, any native hardwoods that sprout there should be encouraged in addition to the planted poplars. Eminently suitable are ash (Fraxinus), maple (Acer), birch (Betula), hornbeam (Carpinus), and wild hazel.

How would one go about setting up such a coppice? In the first year, the whole area would need to be planted with circa 30 cm long twig cuts from poplar trees, buried at 50 cm intervals in north-south rows 1,5 m apart. In the second year, before sprouting, they all would need to be cut down at the desired height (I am cutting mine at about waist height, because that is the easier height to use the tools). In the third year, four fifths would need to be cut, and one would be left intact. In the fourth year, three-fifths would be cut, and two would be left. In the fifth year, two fifths would be cut, and three would be left. And in the sixth year, finally,  only one fifth would be cut, and that would be the way to go forward – always cutting the longest growing fifth of the plot. This would maximize the harvest of firewood about the thickness of a human forearm.

But that is not all, the coppice could also serve as a source of food all that time. It would be full of insects, and thus it would be eminently suitable as a pasture for chickens and rabbits. There would not be much grass growing under the trees, but there would be some that could be either grazed or made into hay. And lastly, the trees would sprout an overabundance of twigs each spring, from which only some survive and become firewood. Many of those twigs can be harvested throughout the summer and used as fodder for rabbits, either directly or dry. I estimate that together with other supplements to be discussed later, it should be possible to feed five egg-laying hens, a rooster, and one male and two-three female rabbits to provide their offspring yearly for sacrifice on the kitchen altar. If that makes you uncomfortable, I understand, but that is the best way to make the most out of the coppice.

I will write about the sewage cleaning facility next.

Self-Sustainability Tangent – Part 8 – Land Partitioning Again

I had to do some math, and I realized that my previous garden plan does not add up. I knew that I needed to have at least 500 m2 fields, with 100 m²”other”, but I could not fit that into the 3000 m² available. I thought slightly smaller fields would still work, but when I calculated the calories that can be produced in this area, I found it lacking. My initial estimation was wrong; 3000 m² is just not enough. There are two main reasons for this:

  1. When making the initial estimate, I grossly underestimated how much space would be taken by the buildings and the paths between them.
  2. I completely forgot the sewage cleaning facility, which takes up somewhere around 70 m².

And since the point of this exercise is not to make it work with 3000 m² but to find an area that would work, I enlarged the plot to 3300 m² by adding five meters in the south.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

This allowed me to keep the sewage cleaning facility at almost the same size, to enlarge the five fields into 100 m², and add some raised beds for additonal crops to what would be grown in the fields. And now, after uploading it, I notice that I forgot to correct a typo. I won’t bother correcting it; have fun finding it, if you haven’t already.

In the next post, I will write in detail about how to use the coppice.