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.
i wonder if that word became a slur for gay people because we might bundle some hard woods together if you know what i mean heyo heyo heyooo
tsk Bébé
tsk tsk
a bit off topic
Charly
Your coppicing scheme reads alot like my attempts at growing asparagus.
(not really worth it unless you have ALOT of space and ALOT of years)
Coppice or pollard choice is somewhat dependent on if you are also using the land to raise animals, larger animals like sheep, goats or particularly cattle make pollarding a necessity as they will happily eat all of the nice new shoots in a coppice.
chigau the oft repeated advice about growing asparagus is that you should have started twenty years ago. We did grow it successfully in our Sheffield garden, but the soil here is just clay, and despite Mr J’s digging out a bed and carefully filling it with suitable material, building it above ground level, it’s just too wet. The best asparagus I’ve seen growing was in the Oxford suburb of Headington, right opposite the crematorium, the soil there is just a little richer than a sandpit.
Bundling hard woods together? Oh dear, is Bébé becomng…..a fascist?
I used to grow asparagus.and when I moved nearly 40 years ago, I decided it wasn’t worth doing again. Now I’m sorry, as I’d have had plenty by now. Anyway, when I planted mine, it was in a place that had previously had horses. I planted it with a liberal amount of horse manure, and kept a big rain barrel with horse manure in it, making a rich nutrient tea. Asparagus is a heavy feeder, and does pretty well even after a short few years if you fertilize it enough.
One tree I don’t always see listed among those that do well in a coppice is box elder. Trashy soft maple, not the best firewood, but it does burn, and does so cleanly without creosote, it splits easily, and grows fast out of stumps. It is, essentially, a woody weed. It’s the major wood I burn, along with dead elm, just because it’s here. As a bonus, it turns out to be one of the most desirable woods for bowl turning! And in spring, the bees like it too.
I forgot to mention one other potential wood. Though it might come under the general heading of poplar, quaking aspen is about the same in burning behavior as box elder. It grows pretty fast, and has what might be a useful property of sprouting from roots. A large patch of aspen forest is often actually a single tree under the ground.
Matthew Currie, I listed the genera in Latin precisely because English plant nomenclature is a mess. Box Elder is a maple (Acer negundo), and quaking aspen is a poplar (Populus tremuloides), and both would be suitable for a coppice. That they are relatively soft hardwoods is actually a plus in this regard, because the coppiced wood would manage to completely dry out over the summer of the same year it was cut.
Coppicing doesn’t seem to have been a thing here in Finland. I still don’t know if the concept even has a Finnish name, and I know a lot of forestry terminology.
I imagine people would normally just cut selected young trees from the village forest (which was later allocated between individual farms) before they got too big for convenient handling. Birch was traditionally strongly favored, because it’s common and grows fast and burns especially well. Aspen, alder, goat willow and pine were common secondary choices. Spruce was considered very poorly suited for burning, because it has big resin glands that will crackle and pop in the fire.
Many of the tree species you mention are not much or at all present in Finland. Here in the southern coastal area, I’ve noticed that European aspen, goat willow, Norwegian maple and northern bird cherry are especially good at growing vigorous new shoots in places where people keep cutting them down. I see hazel as an ornamental here and there, and it does look naturally ready for coppicing.
I once saw an interesting mention of medieval farming practices in Germany. Trees or branches for firewood were apparently usually cut down in early winter, presumably because that’s when farmers have free time and the weather is conveniently cool for vigorous labor. Probably at some point during the winter you’d get a proper snow cover, which makes it easier to haul the trunks home on a sled. The final chopping of the firewood would be done in early summer, when there is a lull between sowing and haymaking. Presumably, the chopped firewood would be then immediately stacked for drying/storage, and it’d be passably dry by autumn.
lumipuna
Could cutting wood in winter be because the trees are dormant?
There is less moisture in the wood.
I don’t think the season makes much difference on that. Trees have several mechanisms to avoid freezing damage, but wholesale desiccation is not one of them. Major drying is needed for firewood, unless you have a high tech furnace that can utilize the volatile organic compounds present in fresh wood, to compensate the heat loss that goes into evaporating water.
In natural-ish northern forests, pine and spruce (unlike hardwoods) are often available as dry deadwood, which is convenient if you need to make a fire with freshly gathered wood.
I mentioned box elder because although it’s technically an acer, some people dismiss it as a trash tree (which it sort of is), and if you were a firewood cutter and sold it to customers as maple, you’d be roundly cussed. It’s said generally that one does best to cut these threes in the dormant season because they dry faster. Box elder is very wet when green, but dries fast, and is usually ready to burn in a year.
Here in New England we get plenty of elm as dry deadwood. The progression is very fast. Young and even middle-aged elms still grow until the bark beetles get them. A previously full-growing tree can be dead in two years, and within a year, the woodpeckers will have eaten the beetles, the bark falls off, and the tree will be standing barkless a year or so after it died. Good firewood if you have a machine to split it.
Coppice related question: I have an apple tree that we decided to remove about six years ago. We cut it back to essentially a pollard, then never got around to removing the rest. Now the shoots are 8-10 feet tall, and I keep looking at it and wondering what I could do with them besides just burn them. Suggestions?
If it was an apple tree that had once made good apples, and your reason for doing it in was either age or location, it is theoretically possible to air layer the shoots, and start new trees somewhere else. Since apple trees are generally clones and only the grafted parts allowed to grow, the shoots should produce the same kid of apples the tree did.
Mind you, I’ve never done this with apples, and I don’t know how successful it would be, nor how long it might be before a new tree bears.
Otherwise, I don’t know of much use for those shoots, unless you want to get into bent-wood art.
@lumipuna, the seasons do make a difference with regard to moisture in the wood, especially the sapwood. The trees do not dessicate for winter, but they do reduce the amount of water in the wood a bit. And in the spring, the trees actually actively pump water into the wood. In these modern and more environmentally-conscious times, there is another reason to fell the trees in winter -- it is before the birds start nesting in them.
@rwiess, if you have shoots on an established root system, you can try to graft them. It is possible to grow several variants on one root system that way. Apple wood is pretty hard, dense, and springy, so it is suitable for selfbows if it happens to be straight and knot-free enough. It is also suitable for tool handles, pipes, and walking sticks. It is also excellent wood for smoking meats.
@Mathew Currie, box elder is an introduced species in central Europe, so I have some experience with the plant. It grows much faster than local maples (A. pseudoplatanus, A. platanoides, A. campestre), and it regrows from a stump more readily. So, as far as coppicing goes, it is a really good option. And in its native area, it would be an excellent option. The relatively low density is actually a plus in this regard, because it dries quicker (as you note), and what it lacks in density, it makes up for in volume.
Huh, I just saw someone on Twitter claim that the Czech name for November is literally “Treefall”. Charly, can you confirm?
BTW in Finnish a similar name belongs to April (huhtikuu). This refers to the felling of huuhta, a specific type of agricultural clearing and burning system. A patch of forest with mature trees, that were previously girded and let to dry standing up, would be felled down and roughly chopped to bits in early spring. Then the trunks would be burned just before sowing a crop, to destroy the undergrowth and mosses and fertilize the soil with ash. There were also other, more common types of fire cultivation, typically using young stands of birch and other pioneer hardwood trees that were allowed to grow for a couple decades.
Trees for firewood and construction were usually felled in winter during snow cover, for logistical reasons and because the farmers had free time.
@lumipuna, November in Czech is called “Listopad”, which means “The month when the leaves fall from the trees”.
Thanks, Charly.
Here in Vermont, November is “stick season.”
Apple grafting is certainly an option if you have something to graft to. Long ago I had a piece of land with a lot of wild, volunteer apple trees, and had great plans to do some grafting, but family matters intervened and I had to move before I got to it. My grandfather, an orchardist in his later years, had the knack, and could get good results with his pocket knife and a ball of twine, but I never developed it. The few times I tried, I ended up with sticks.