If this trick works we get almost infinite firewood AND blueberries!

welcome back I was trying to figure out where the edges of my property lie because I didn't actually get a survey when we moved in because it was expensive and I found an old survey post and a back fence line quite a bit further than I thought we had so I checked it against the plat map and I found out we actually own a couple acres of woods Beyond the Edge of the pasture where the cows are currently now there's something really cool about these woods and that is they're full of wild blueberries foreign these Woods are not particularly old as you could see the diameter of the trunks is not hugely impressive on most of them which means this is probably a large amount regrowth mostly Red Oaks a few cherries and other things but in the understory here there are a lot of these so these are rabbit eye blueberries which are a good blueberry and there is Bush after Bush after Bush after bush that's a rabbit eye that's a rabbit eye that's a rabbit eye almost all the understory plants and shrubs in here our rabbit eye blueberries they're just absolutely everywhere so this is a conundrum if I leave the woods the way they are these rabbit eyes will produce almost no yield they need sunshine well I have been reading a book called copis agroforestry lately if you haven't read it I highly recommend it I'm about halfway through right now and it's given me plenty of ideas it's an idea that I've thought about for a while copacing and pollarding but the sheer amount of usefulness that can be found in both practices is uh man I think I could have a regenerative wood lot here that just keeps coming back plus I could probably get tons of compost for the garden fodder for animals and I can free up this Blueberry Patch but we have to take down some of the trees in order to do so so we can open it up select out the species we want keep those species and cut the others and when you cop as a tree you cut it all the way down to the ground while it's dormant and then in the spring it regenerates and it makes multiple shoots which everybody's seen this who has taken a tree out and you've seen the power companies do this before however if you manage it in such a way as to allow those shoots to regrow they will grow back into trunks and if you let the trunk get to a proper diameter you can let it get to the diet diameter of a tool handle size or post for the Garden or weaving material for baskets or you can use it when it gets larger at firewood size so you might wait until it gets three inches or four inches and get perfectly sized firewood pieces like this one right here that's about right for firewood maybe a little bit bigger like that one back there but you can get multiple products and allow it to come back but what happens is that disturbance is going to allow the light in by taking this tree down and it also regenerates the lifespan of the tree as it gets taken down and it shoots back up from the base it rejuvenates it and a tree can actually live much longer than it would otherwise but you've got to let it grow back once you've cut it down [Music] mm-hmm [Music] [Applause] good job okay let's take a look at our little Blueberry Patch here after about an hour and a half or so of chainsawing we released a lot of these rabbit eyes now you could see little stumps here and there and you know you can't go super fast necessarily doing this especially when I'm trying to cut it up into firewood we have a few fireplaces in our new house even our bedroom actually has a fireplace which is so crazy and uh we've really needed it because the house is drafty and if I can get a good firewood Supply it would be excellent and with compassing and pollarding we should be able to do that we should have a permanent Supply now if I had a big chipper a lot of this could also be converted into mulch and I could have a ready source of repeating mulch as the plants grow back again after damage I did an experiment over here because I know the deer come through here so I'm a little afraid of them eating all the compass shoots so composting is when you cut it all the way to the ground pollarding is when you cut it up high and so I polared it these two sweet gums right here and I'm going to cut that one down again as well in a minute but you can see I've got some good firewood logs out of those two just digesting it a bit at a time and we did throw it down here through the middle of this huge rabbit eye Bush by the way see this rabbit eye is easily 12 feet tall I was talking to Randall at flomatin Famous if you guys aren't subscribed to Randall and Michelle you should um over at Flemington famous and he was talking about how when they clear cut the pine trees that were near his place as a kid suddenly all of the blueberries that had been underneath started blooming and producing bumper crops of blueberries and that's what I would like back here if we have roughly 100 to 200 blueberry individuals and I can freeze some of them up by copacing and pollarding and opening the light up I may even girdle some of these trees just to let the light through and uh Dead Fall trees like that too um the dead stump stumps and such are also a good wildlife habitat provided they don't fall in your head so this is getting much more open one piece at a time here and we have to wait until spring to see what it looks like when it grows back when you do this it's important to remember your dormancy period is when you should be cutting it should not be in the middle of summer or in Spring we want to do this while most of the sap is down in the roots for the best regrowth possible so the point of all this is to ensure there is light in here for the blueberries and then secondarily we get firewood and other materials from in here and we're going to encourage the species that we want to stick around and the ones that we don't want we will remove why couldn't I put pecans back here or some black walnut or mulberries or Basswood or other useful species I can and if I accomplice the existing trees we'll take advantage of those root systems to make a whole bunch of new Woody growth but at the same time we open up enough light so we can put other things in here around the rabbit eye blueberries we've also got yapon Holly back here which we can use for tea and that's our native North American source of caffeine it's a fantastic little shrub and this is one of the only spots on my entire property where I have any is back here in these woods they tend to grow in community with blueberries and then what has happened is that the regrowth has kind of gotten over the top of them over probably the last 20 years or so and it has just run this area underneath so in Spring it's going to get really exciting out here and we'll see what happens as another side benefit I got a few logs that we can saw up there was a big dead Pine back here that is not rotten all the way through and I'm going to be able to use that to make some Pine Boards out of with Randall probably you could probably use that to build a chicken coop or a pig enclosure or something like that but it's free lumber it's just out here it's just gonna rot in the woods so why not use it and why not get the most use out of the space possible that's what I'm thinking so anyhow I've been inspired and I'm spending this time through the winter doing these winter tasks which I wouldn't be able to do or wouldn't really be inclined to do during the summer but right now it's been pretty cool and if you work hard for a little bit you warm up enough that being a t-shirt feels great catch you all next time check out that book Hoppus agroforestry I uh I'm really enjoying it so far leave a comment below let me know what you think about us completely clear cutting all the woods here I'm sure that that will be very popular and until next time make your thumbs always be green [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: David The Good

Views: 109,280

Keywords: David The Good, coppicing, blueberries, growing rabbiteye blueberries, rabbiteye blueberries, coppicing oak, coppicing trees, coppice wood lot, wood lot, firewood cutting, coppicing woodland, coppicing system, wood lot management, coppice trees, coppice agroforestry, coppice forest, coppicing trees for firewood, coppice woodland, blueberry patch, wild blueberries, alabama gardening

Id: lchN2QkDdZU

Length: 10min 32sec (632 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 03 2022