Coppicing Hazel, Why, When & How

[Music] hello fellow youtubers welcome to my channel today in this video i'm going to be talking about coppicing as a forest management method and in particular i'm going to be talking about coppicing hazel trees so this is a hazel here you can see it's got multiple stems there's a lot of them around this section of the woodland and they would have all have been coppiced at some point in the past and that's what causes them to produce these multi-stemmed structures so compassing is quite an old management tool been around for a long time at least a thousand years um the medieval time they used to use it for in conjunction with a sheep with a big sheep the wool industry in britain and the products from the hazel coppers they would use to make things like fences hurdles etc and they used to use it for managing their sheep block but these have some sources where people think it actually goes back even further than that probably two thousand possibly even three thousand years they found evidence of trackways and marshes etc where they would have cut down things like hazel and used the products to create structures for their survival it's a lovely crisp winter's morning today and winter is generally a really good time for copperson and there's a few reasons for that firstly there's a lot less foliage so you're able to access the stems a lot more easily there's less disruption to wildlife because they aren't nesting in the trees um you know using it as a habitat or shelter and another key reason is the way to think about a tree um in particular the trees that you caucus they're actually a tail of two hearts so what you see above ground there's actually mirrored underneath the ground as well so there's a really strong big root structure under the ground which is often the same size the equivalent biomass of what you see above ground so what the trees do is they keep in the winter they actually pull a lot of the sugars out of the main tree and the sap is actually pulled the sugars are pulled down into the roots and they use it as storage so it's actually becomes being dormant over the winter and then in the spring they flush it back they the sap flushes back up to sugars rise up through the stems and by copying the winter a lot of that sugar has been pulled down into the rootstock and because there's less sugar in the actual wood when you take the product that you're going to use for poles or logs they don't decay as quickly because there's less tasty sugars in the wood for grubs and fungus etc so there's a few reasons why winters is a really good time for crops and um that's it that's a few of them so hazel is actually one of the best trees to coppers there's a long traditional coppicing hazel and they are really good at regenerating from their roots and the way they work is that there's a number of buds all along the stem all the way up but most of these trees they actually have a dominant but at the top which is where they grow from so a lot of these smaller buds on the size actually stay dormant through the year but when it gets cut the tree responds by reinvigorating that bud and those are the new growth so the new poles shoot from those buds and they all spring up from that bark so one of the important things is to make sure when you cut the trunks down you've got enough space where you can least clear the moss and see some of those little buds so that they can flush in the spring and what will happen is that rootstock will just sense that all their trunks have gone they want to get uh stems and leaves up into the air to get photos to photosynthesize and so they will really push in a lot of energy into those stems and they'll grow from those buds so composing tools are fairly straightforward um if there's a large area for to be compassed a lot of people use chainsaws and you know i have used a chainsaw in the past and i would typically use a chainsaw it's quite a nice peaceful day the one problem the chainsaw makes a lot of noise if you do want to do big big areas of coppers the chainsaw's fairly um compulsory these days the tools i'm going to be using today simple bow saw and that's really what i'm going to do the bulk of the cutting of the trunks you can see they're not very big so they should be easily taken down with a bow saw and then to actually produce the product you want to use which is the wood or the trunks you can use something like a bill hook or an axe in this case it's my rinaldi axe which you've seen in some of my other videos and it's actually i believe it's a pruning axe so it should be quite good just limbing the trees the branches quite quickly so those are the main tools i'm really using if you look at the clothes so that's that's a fairly small stool and you can see the multiple stems if you look at this one there's a very old stem there and then a number of smaller ones at some point in time this was coppiced and that was the original trunk and a number of other smaller shoots have actually come out from that original stump now it's actually decaying and dead this one so it is a quite a common strategy for trees to employ they shoot again particularly hazel are very good at it they will shoot from their rootstock because those roots there underneath are still functioning well now one of the advantages of coppicing it is a man made management tool so there's an argument as to why you would do it you know why don't you let nature take its course well a lot of the woodland left in britain is all heavily managed and there's not a lot left really of any kind of wild wood so it's a good way of rejuvenating a tree because that rootstock will then stay vibrant and keep pumping vitality into the stems the knock-on effect of all of that is actually the biodiversity of the wooden as you can see this is quite overstood which means it's overgrown and it's shading all the ground so what's happening in a lot of moss but not much else when you actually compass and reduce the crown right down to the root stock you get flushes of flowers which supports insects like a lot of woodland butterflies small mammals etc so there's a number of those animals which have actually and plants which have adapted to corpus management and so it's a really useful thing to ensure that you can actually make a small area as biodiverse as possible so although it's a human invented management tool it has got a lot of benefits for encouraging biodiversity in the woodland so in this case with this one we're going to take all of these stems out and this one and then the crown the area that's covered covering the crown will be reduced allowing light down into the woodland floor and in the spring a lot of these shoots will flush out and they'll be able to big undergrowth will pop up as well so dormant bulbs and other flowers will cover up through the soil and should see an increase in insects and small mammals will come back into this area so it actually is a way of taking a morrow and woodland and making it a lot more vital and bright others okay so i finished cutting all the main stems down as you can see it's important to do quite a neat job and you also want it to be sloping if possible towards the outside of the stump and that just helps to shed water i've also cleared out a lot of the leaf litter from the center of the stump and that's really to stop any rot and decay happening in the middle of stump so come spring really this these these stems have got the best opportunity to flush out the new boats so it's a nice clean finish and hopefully it's in the best place it can be for the spring i've also noticed actually there's quite a few little hazel shells have been eaten by squirrels and that's probably a reason why we never get any hazelnuts off these trees and squirrels all over the place unfortunately it's the grace we're all not the red so a bit of a pest and they pretty much eat all the hazel's before we get any something to consider when you're handling the logs that you've taken down is where possible is to sort of lay them in the same direction so when you were working your way through a woodland you fell them all down in the same direction and work your way back it just makes it a lot easier when you're going through blooming them taking the brush off etc they're all very higgledy-piggledy it's actually quite difficult to get in amongst them to deal with them so where possible you lay them out in the same line of orientation [Music] so we finished processing all the material now we'll cut everything up into various sizes and if this was a well managed compass you know on a sort of 15 year rotation maximum you would have nice straight um poles which could have used for a variety of activities probably this stuff has actually been growing well over 20 years since it was last popper so it's all a bit straggly and the majority of this is actually really just fit for firewood and kindly so the last thing we've done is we used all this fine brush which is the tops of the trunks just to make the wind grow and that's a good way of just creating habitat for small mammals but also for protecting regrowth of delicate flowers and things so it's good practice and never be tempted to burn that because it's really valuable as a habitat [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: bundu fundi

Views: 66,280

Keywords: iMovie

Id: Vgob7Ta1BMU

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 21 2020