Derelict hazel coppice produce: own-use firewood, bean rods. Neolithic-ing. Walking sticks.

okay copies products and byproducts i've basically taken about half an acre of this which is derelict hazel coppice and i've turned it into some stuff that i'll show you this is the product i'm most interested in while cutting derelict hazel is for firewood i must stress that i haven't paid anything to be allowed to come in here and cut my fee is basically workmanlike job to restore it to seven year rotation in cycle hazel coppice this is derelict and if we can take the edge of here down to that wind blow down there that's a similar area to what i've actually cut this year and i'll show you what i've actually got out of it these here are sun shoots and you can see what's happening basically these stools are under a certain amount of stress they're under a lot of competition for light and what hazel tends to do anyway is put up these shoots so basically a multiple stemmed tree in inverted commas it doesn't tend to form maidens even if you leave it completely alone like saying oakwood like that wind blow over there but it'll put up these sun shoots and especially when it's stressed as you can see on these stalls it puts up a lot of them but a lot of these are actually dead so this one's dead these actually all alive at the moment and you can see it puts them out up the the major stems as well this one here lots and lots dead this one's dead come back to him in a minute this one's dead this one's dead dead did you get the picture they basically find themselves where they're not actually producing very much for the tree as a whole so they die off and it tries again and again and again while we're here said i'd come back to this this is what's known as neolithicking someone's been in here and possibly like neolithic man of old they've used a bill hook and they've actually cut this off it's re-shot here this basically if it's done too extreme you can see more here that's nearly thicked off possibly those but if it's done to extreme you basically mimic what happens when the sun shoots die off keeps putting up sun shoots they keep dying off because it's under stress for light and the stool cycles down gets smaller number of stems on the stool get gets smaller get fewer and your coppice ends up with fewer stools you can see all the dead ones in here so that's sun shoots and that's my by-product so i cut those and then basically sell those locally in limited quantities some years i don't manage to sell any at all and i basically have them in bundles at home let them dry out in season and i turn them into kindling so it doesn't get wasted this is my main product firewood i reckon there's between three and four tons there because all these are five foot long i also produce these which are stakes they're the straightest nicest bits you can sell those for hedging as hedging stakes and they need to be pointed at the bottom and flat at the top because they need to be driven in and you can cut those with a bill hook all with a chainsaw and then point them with a bill hook i use those on my login break and that needs new uprights so they'll go for that this is all firewood this one here tend to leave some lengths really long where they're really nice but that will end up as stakes my login break this here is an incidental this is where i was sharpening my chainsaw you can see i've board in with the bar and that's a convenient height to actually do the sharpening rather than lugging a vice out here or trying to do it across your knee and in here is where i've been working on the sun shoots so bean rods six foot eight foots ten foots over here and these i'll just cut these as an example they'll end up as bean rods more than ten feet and tapering almost to nothing these are hedging heathers use it used to bind in the tops of a laid hedge this is my measure just laid these on the ground so starting at that end first notch five foot six second notch six feet third notch eight feet and at the end is ten foot if you're doing it seriously you basically have your measure with an end stop on it and that sits at waist height so it's much more convenient you also have a rack like this much longer which you make this is just to bend over sun shoot that's been left possibly for layering you can actually put your material on so you can work through it without bending too much so those are the ten foots those are some extras and some of these won't be any good for instance this one here it's a bit fat at this end for a bean rod also for a hedging heather basically hedging stakes are between 11 and 12 inches between and the heathers have to be flexible enough to weave in between them and to roll over each other once woven this one here has got a floor so i might get an eight foot beam rod at the end of that this one here i've left this has come from halfway up a main stem and it's got a a bulb on the end so basically put it against here like that smack it with a bill hook and you'll end up with a nice clean cut note your upstream cuts so this is the end of cut off the bean rod this bit up here is always sound and for some reason this bit you cut off here always delaminates like this sometimes when you get a rod at the bottom of a stool it's jade so it has a curve on it and you always cut that off sometimes you strike with the bill hook so you end up with a nice straight slightly longer section so you cut this piece off here so your build has to be sharp and you need to be accurate other by-products thumb sticks if you can fit your thumb in a fork like this and it's a nice clean length then you can use that as a thumb stick it's a type of walking stick basically you cut it so the v-notch i should have done done one the right length is about just above shoulder height or at shoulder height sits in like that so if you've got lower back pain instead of using a traditional walking stick or a crutch use one of these and you can lean on that and it keeps your back straight once upon a time when we mum who was a nurse was a young nurse this is back in the middle to late 60s you could get these on the nhs and you would then have them cut to length so they were the right height for you another one here the floor in it so that one's no good into the dead edge with him and broom handles so your broom goes on the fat end or your other tool i tend to like a long broom handle the ones you get in the shops are really short and they tend to be tropical hardwood fit that to your broom and it'll last you if you keep it under cover it'll last you five six years so uh stuff for free so you gotta got the effort of making it and that i think is about it and here's my incidentals forky sticks for holding up the ends of pleached layered trees we'll actually go and have a look at those now but we'll do that in another clip

Channel: Anemone

Views: 3,874

Keywords:

Id: MgKjgWWZ5dM

Length: 10min 24sec (624 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022