Is it really possible to grow firewood in just a few years?

I know it looks like I've done a really bad thing to this tree but actually this is compensating it'll help it throw up huge amounts of new wood that we can use as firewood it's like magic [Music] I need to cut it flush with the ground the idea is you want the tree to send up new shoots from the roots that helps to be more stable in the ground all this will then get a process and turn into new trees right as you can see I cut this it's flushed to the ground as I could you might be wondering why I cut it twice well the first time I cut it was to take all this weight off of the top so when it came over it might accidentally rip the the bark which then lead to possible infection so you take the the large weight off first and then do a more clean cut at the end all right so this tree is three years old we planted it in the spring I think in February of 2020. when it went to the ground it was are no thicker than about that at about 30 centimeters long this is a good opportunity to also show you why we have a deer fence installed deer will rub their antlers on trees and in doing so well it might be fun for them it scrapes off all the bark and if you have no bark then you can't get water and nutrients down so the tree dies particularly if they take the bark off all the way around so you can see there's damage on this Branch there's damage on this branch and it happens all the time and so this is why we had to put up a deer fence we don't like to exclude wildlife and it feels unnatural to do so but if we want to have a woodland and we can't have deer at least not where the Woodland is Young you can actually see the remnants of the original Rod which is here obviously add that bit on it was that far sticking up above the ground and this is what you get in three years um so next step is we need to process this cut this all up into new rods because we're going to use it to plant about 10 000 square meters of new coppice so that's exciting [Music] foreign [Music] you can see we've got all these rods now there's about 25 of them in here this will turn into a whole new tree and because they're all cut from One Tree they're in fact clones so it's a way of having genetically identical Offspring from whatever tree it is you're you're cutting from these will just push in our soils silt and Clay so they'll just push straight into the soil no problem when they get kind of the fatter ones they can be a bit more effort and I've cut a slope on the end so I'm hoping to drive in but we'll take a long a lump Hammer as well because it might be a little manual encouragement to uh to go in but there you go be 25 new trees in no time right all these little tiny bits are no good for using these rods to plants and new trees they just bend if you try to put them in the soil what we do with them instead is make something called a dead hedge which is where you stack up all over the brush this stuff little twiddly bits into something quite incredible so this is a dead hedge um we created this a couple of years ago with branches from a big beech tree that fell down in the storm you can see the stump of it perhaps over there I just took some of the larger branches and got a mallet and drove them into the ground to form these sort of holders or the fence poster fair if you like then we took all the branches and you kind of weave them in um to sort of try to make the thing as tight-knit as possible and it's fantastic for wildlife fungi invertebrates um you know it's a really creative way of dealing with all the offcuts and and brush that you get you might also notice all of our tree tubes in the background that's our new baby Woodland right here's the willow that we accomplished a couple of years ago when I say coppist we actually ran over with the lawnmower on accident um so would you go for not paying attention the upshot is we now know what a two-year-old coppist Willow looks like it's the exact same sources the other Willow we were looking at earlier you can see at the base the stems are now about an inch in diameter 200 centimeters in diameter Willa will grow at a rate um about an inch in circumference every year so you can work out what sort of size Vlog you want that's how you know long you need to let it go for we're hoping that we can cut these on a cycle of something like five to seven years which will give us wood that's large enough to use as firewood it isn't as well as you can Compass we have loads of Hazels as well they cop as beautifully as those older we're planting loads of older in our Fields as well so the idea is a good enough Willow that we can become self-sufficient in firewood and the Fantastic thing is apparently when A Tree Grows it sort of has a life cycle and it will grow to a certain size and eventually get old like everything else and die when you cop us a tree it stops that process and it becomes I wouldn't say Immortal but it will grow for hundreds and hundreds of years way longer than its natural lifespan would have been so while it seems really brutal to cut a tree to the ground it actually rejuvenates it and prolongs its life and provides fantastic habitat this sort of Mosaic you'll get by cutting parts of your coppice one year and another part another Another Part you'll have this sort of succession of sizes because clearly to the ground rejuvenates it and keeps it going and going and going for hundreds of years it means you've got all practical purposes an inexhaustible source of free firewood they don't need fertilizer they don't need watering once they get established they just grow now you might be thinking to yourself or what did you ask them you have to cut it to the ground in future because that's gonna be kind of hard to do no you don't the next time you cut it you cut it a bit higher up it'll then form sort of a stool is what it's called a short stump and which will be slightly off the ground so it is easier to catch in future so it's not such a damaging for the salt it'll be cutting through the soil all the time right so this is where we're planting our new coppist there's about a thousand Willow rods in the ground at the moment we're hoping to plant another couple of hundreds and it'll be 1200 all together the idea is to plant them about two meters apart we want to give them enough space to grow but pack in as many as we can we also don't want them to grow wild we want them to grow tall so we turn them into firewood without too many side branches we hope this is a good spacing we'll find out I suppose so we're going to put in a new row just now a couple of canes some blue poly twine measuring tape which will string out that way so it makes it easy to get the planting all in straight row this is one of the rods that I cut the other day from our Nursery Corpus I'll put this in the ground and just about there I think Willow's amazing that way you just put it in the ground and it will root we've planted all of other coppice plants that way um and it is fantastic so we've got some mulch mats these are biodegradable so we don't need to worry about going to collect them back in later and literally the place up with plastic these are bamboo so the whole thing will just rot down in no time at all so five pegs per mulch mat push them in like this one in each corner and then the fifth one is where the mulch mat overlaps and that's it they should go beautifully so I hope you enjoyed that [Music] foreign

Channel: The View from the Clouds

Views: 15,491

Keywords: firewood, fire wood

Id: VkHcGiYlsew

Length: 8min 6sec (486 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 11 2023