Coppice willow for free firewood forever! It’s crazy simple!

this is the magic of copacing I cut all of these trees to the ground this past winter this is one Summer's growth and this is also one season's growth we planted this as a new tree this past winter so it's about seven months old and nowhere near as vigorous the difference is very interesting now this tree is four years old last year I cut it to the ground the amazing thing about that which is copper scene is that you now have roots in the ground that can supply the nutrition and moisture that the growth needs to do this so you compare this to the one-year-old shoot I showed you a few moments ago it's incredible what happens now Willow is a good choice for us because it really loves but thrives in really wet ground which is what we have here it also doesn't mind having wind which we also get a lot of so hopefully our compasses will continue to thrive and provide us with a huge amount of free firewood and it's also eco-friendly this is the tree I coppersed in my video last March I've cleared the grass away from the bottom so we can see what's going on I think we'll need to move this big white dog as well come see when I cut this tree I tried to cut it as flush to the soil as possible doing that causes it to throw up new branches from the roots that has the effect of widening the base of the tree making it more stable which is incredibly helpful on a windy site like ours the cut face here is beginning to get covered over by all this new growth that will then protect it from future infections this is another good reason why we want to start a copper scene tree when it's fairly small a year or two old is ideal so this tree is doing really really well this is a four-year-old uncompassed willow tree so you can see the kind of difference you get between copacing it and not one of the main benefits of copacing a tree of course is you get loads of shoots instead of just one main stem but then does a couple of branches now these trees get to about this kind of height I'm nearly six feet tall and it's what two maybe more than two of me so about 12 feet tall the base is about two inches in diameter the one we were looking at a moment ago was about three quarters of an inch in diameter already so you can see the huge benefit you get from copacine it really is an extraordinary technique now we're going to cut this coppus in stages so that you get different heights and different stages of development which then attracts different sorts of Wildlife and should be fantastic so looking forward to doing that here's an interesting situation when I coppersed these trees I did it in two stages I cut it fairly High to begin with to take the weight off and make it easier to maneuver then I cut it flush with the ground this is copper scene there's another technique you can use called pole lighting where you cut the tree much higher the goal there being if deer are around they can't reach up high enough to eat all the new shoots that are growing I seem to have created a mini polar now this is about knee-high and as you can see it's created huge amounts of new wood and you might think that this is a fantastic technique to get more and more wood and it probably is the difficulty we have is that our soil is mostly clay and silt and it's always soaking wet so it doesn't have a lot of strength to it I'll show you in a moment we have a tree that got pollarded and you get a huge amount of growth at the top which then gets caught in the wind and blows the whole thing over which obviously isn't very good for the longevity of the tree so this is an interesting experiment and it might suit you and your situation so here's the example of a pole artist tree that's currently falling over it was cut about here you can see the multiple branches coming off of it the previous owners didn't have a deer fence and so they'd pollarded it to protect it against Road Deer which can eat the fresh little shoots up to about a meter and a half High the difficulty is you get lots of large branches at the top now if you thin them you can make the top less heavy so that is one solution to enable you to get firewood from a Pollard like this however this tree is busy falling over and we really don't want it to do that so this winter what is called dormant we're going to cut it down to ground level and try to turn it into a corpus I say try because oftentimes larger trees simply won't make the conversion and they just fail often they'll also only shoot after the first year or two so it's a bit of a delay involved there as well another problem with it is you then have a very large cut face which invites infection and will then kill the root so it's a bit of a risky thing to do but we don't want this tree Landing in the field over here so that's going to be the next big project now here's something I'm very happy about this is a little baby oak tree it was planted here probably by a bird a Jay they like to plant acorns they then come along in the spring and eat the fat leaves that are the first ones to come out of the acorn in the spring when they're growing but oftentimes they miss them and you get trees now we have about two and a half acres over here separates it off for natural regen we're not planted any trees on it at all and our hope is that the Jays will do the same thing up there and we'll get loads of oak trees also because in our deer fence we have Badger Gates the Badgers come in and roots are on the ground looking for whatever it is they're hungry for and disturb the soil meaning that there's a space and open space for seeds to land on crops Willow seeds to then take root and grow now we only have this here because of our deer fence if the deer fence wasn't there the road deer would come along and just eat that because they really like them and there'll be no oak trees so I'm really hopeful that we're going to have a wonderful naturally planted native Woodland just over there this is our new coppers these trees were planted this past winter 2023 and they're doing really well it's now September so the leaves are changing due to being awesome though not ill Willow is an amazingly easy tree to plant you just take a branch and push it into the ground if your ground is soft enough if it's not you can dig a hole or use a pinch bar a bit of metal to make the hole first and plant them that way now these trees are nowhere near as big as the trees in the previous field were at the same age you can see in this photograph from August 2020 that the trees are taller than me so why the difference the difference comes down to mulch that summer really every weekend cutting grass and mulching it around those trees to keep the weeds down and give them the best start possible and it really paid off these trees however are a little bit different if you have a small number of trees you can mulch them but we have 1 200 trees in this field at least and most of them just isn't going to be practical so we're having to rely instead on these which are biodegradable mulch mats they're 50 centimeter by 50 centimeter Peg down with bamboo pegs they do help suppress the grass somewhat but it's nowhere near as good as a big mound of grass like we did with the previous trees but it all has to start somewhere and I'm sure these trees will grow and be beautiful and provide us with endless firewood so I hope you can have this kind of success and uh thank you for watching

Channel: The View from the Clouds

Views: 101,386

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Id: sJaNXIcl8ZM

Length: 6min 53sec (413 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 30 2023