Hello and welcome back to Gubb Farm. I'm
in Floodsalot and I'm in the process of extending the coppicing forest
that I started last year and I've learned a very important lesson
that I'm going to share with you in this video and that is the choice of cutting to
maximize your chances of the trees taking. I took two different types of cuttings
last year. One was branches coming off an established mature tree and the second
where cuttings that came off a tree that was damaged. It was broken over and I took the
water-sprout cuttings. It's the growth that the tree puts out as it attempts to survive
and you get it after you pollarded a three. I did one row using those water sprouts because
I ran out of branches from the established trees and about ninety per cent of them have taken and
about only twenty-five per cent of the cuttings of the mature tree have taken and if I look closely
at the water sprouts, that one two-year-old growth if you look closely you see that
there are lots of buds on it and I think those buds then establish roots in
the ground and there are lots of hormones and they take very well. So here we have an
example of a Willow where it got damaged and then it sent up lots of vertical branches if you look closely at them they've
just got lots of little buds on them. So last year I did one row with cuttings
from this tree and they all took I also tried cuttings off mature branches and they had a very low success rate
so you don't see as many buds on them. Most of them are it's calloused over if that is
the right word, but they're all hardened off. It looks like the best material and for establishing
a coppicing forest is this new growth. I think the optimum age of the new growth
is one to two years. I think after that it starts to harden up and on all the new
Willow growth it's kind of got an orangey tinge to it so you can kind of tell
by looking at it if it was the right thing but ultimately it looks like you want
growth that has lots of fresh new buds on it. It's quite easy to tell what
trees took and what didn't. If you pull on a tree that's been in
the ground and it's taken successfully it doesn't want to come out, as growth that hasn't
taken, just comes straight out of the ground So it didn't establish any real roots of the branch of the cutting So the moral of the story is to take
lots of new growth as your source for cuttings. Now by good fortune in march last
year I coppiced this hedgerow my intention at the time was to thicken it all up. Now there is lots
of regrowth which I could then turn into wood chip but there's been a slight change of plan. Since
I've realised that the new growth that comes up after coppicing or pollarding trees is the
best source of cuttings, I'm just working my way through these trees now taking lots
of cutting from them. I've taken about two thousand cuttings off this hedgerow
so far and I think that by the time I am finished, I will probably have about four
thousand cuttings in the ground so I'll have about just over an acre planted. I'm in Quadrophenia and
I'm just going to the Willow tree that I pollarded two years ago and I'm going to take the new growth
off it for propagating in the coppicing forest. So I've cut back about 80 per cent of the three I am then cutting the branches down
to about 40 to 50 centimeter lengths because I'm running out of cuttings
I'm also using these thinner pieces. I'm not sure whether they're going
to grow but we'll find out next year. so what I'm looking for in any of
the cuttings is I'm looking for signs of new growth; buds breaking through because if you get a couple down
below the ground they should root. I learned last year that if you didn't
cut them back if you left them too long, the tops die so I'm trying to keep
them about 40 to 50 centimeters long. I think the bigger pieces tend to do better
because they have more stored energy in them so I have less confidence in these smaller branches but
some of the bigger ones I'm using as I mentioned I'm planting about three to four thousand
cuttings and that's requiring a lot of material. We now have about two hundred cuttings from
that one three that pollarded two years ago so one tree will hopefully
become a couple of hundred I'm planting the trees about a meter apart and
I'm burying them down to cover two or three buds A key thing as well to remember is to
make sure the buds are pointing upwards Out of this acre that I'm planting and
my hope is that over a six-year cycle I can remove about 12 tonnes of wood chips. I'll
break that down into every other year I'll try to take about four tonnes off it. I have 2100
hazelnut trees and the goal is on a biannual basis every two years to put down around two
kilos of wood chips around the hazelnut trees. This is to provide a going source of nutrients
and just to keep the soil biology fired up. I think from what I've read this should be
achievable. I've read about people getting about 30 tonnes per hectare, which is about 10
to 15 tonnes per acre. This ground is really well suited to Willow and as you can see from
that hedgerow that we coppiced last year it just grows rampantly so I hope to get into the upper
end of what can be expected in terms of yield. It's been seven months since we planted the
cuttings. It is now mid-August and I'm going to take a walk over to the coppicing forest.
I'm quite interested to see how well the thin cuttings did versus the thick cuttings. Did they
both take as well and how strong is the growth, so lets take a walk over there and have a look. As you can see you haven't been doing a lot of
mowing and there's a good reason for that. I started the year mowing around the trees but I've
been doing a lot of research, studying various research papers on this, and it turns out mowing
may not be the best orchard floor management practice, but we get into that in the next video
but there's a good reason why I've left it uncut This is amazing! Everywhere I look there's trees Just trees everywhere Without any shadow of a doubt, this has
worked. Yeah there's trees everywhere, fat thin no matter what sort of cutting
was it that went into the ground it's taken Without any hesitation, if you want to establish
a coppicing forest from Willow or Sally, the strategy is quite simple. Year one knock back your
target trees that you want to take the cuttings from, so pollarded them. On the second year take
that regrowth and cut it into strips of about 30 to 40 or maybe 40 to 50 centimeters. Get
at least two buds into the ground. You want that water sprout growth to come straight up
after three's been knocked back and it's easily, 95 per cent plus have taken. I think I've seen one
and I'm not even sure if it was a Willow cutting, but the worst is I've seen one cutting that hasn't
taken so far, so yeah at least 95 per cent success rate on this and that is startling compared
to last year. Last year I just took cuttings, as i said earlier on, I just took cuttings
off mature threes and stuck them in the ground but they didn't have the buds to form the roots,
I think and it had a very low success rate of but 25 per cent. So to go from 25 per cent to 95 is
great because i was in here for the best part of a week planting these cuttings and it's great
to see them taking so hopefully I've secured a decent supply of wood chip on the farm now and
probably not enough but it's a good step in the right direction. What's also very interesting
to note is the amount of regrowth on this hedge that i took the cuttings from. I took about
80 of the cuttings from it and it's now thick with branches and leaves. They seem to be very
hardy they respond very well to being coppiced and yeah fingers crossed this is working out well. So until next time "Good luck"
