5/1/2023 0 Comments Coppice hazel![]() ![]() An exploitable girth or diameter is fixed according to the size of the material required, and an estimate is made of the age at which material of this size is produced this age determines the rotation, which is divided into a convenient number of felling cycles, and the area is divided into annual coupes equal in number to the number of years in the felling cycle. In principle the working of the coppice selection system is similar to that of the selection system in high forest. Robert Scott Troup described the system in his “Silvicultural Systems” in 1928: It wasn’t planned at the time, but as you can see in the second picture taken this month, there are new stems several inches in diameter, mostly growing from the stumps I left, which have also thickened up. ![]() These two pictures show one hazel stool that I cut in 2009 as part of tidying up the boundary of the Glade. Here and there I’ve noticed how they’ve grown back, which is what suggested the idea of Coppice Selection. These were mostly hazels that I needed to remove for establishing the rides and clearings, and I cut some for fence posts too. Up to now I’ve been cutting and seasoning hazel as firewood for the Log Cabin wood stove. Instead, they have a head start towards becoming logs I can use for firewood, and their green leaves are already there producing sugar to build more wood right from the first spring. ![]() Coppice Selection allows me to avoid cutting and discarding those thin stems. I don’t have a use for thin stems, and I’m not producing enough to try to sell them. However, as I’m just aiming for firewood, and short 10 inch (25 cm) lengths at that, I’m not worried about stems with a bit of a curve. Hazel stems have a tendency to curve over to get more light if other stems shade them, but by starting all the stems at the same time, there is more chance they will grow up from the stool in straight lines. There you are typically aiming for thin, straight poles and rods. ![]() Also firewood and charcoal and coppice management services.What I’m trying with this approach is “Coppice Selection”: you pick a minimum diameter for the stems you want, harvest all stems larger than that, leaving most or all of the thinner stems in place to thicken up.Ĭoppicing in Britain tends to be dominated by “Simple Coppicing”: you remove all of the stems of all the trees in a particular area. For anyone wanting to come and have a look at what we make, we always welcome visits (by prior arrangement, to make sure that we are actually here), or we can be found demonstrating at a number of shows in the west-country during the summer months (have a look at the Courses and Shows page). These cutting expeditions will probably decline in years to come as the hazel at Westonbirt improves, but at the moment it gives us a third area to market our products into. We also still cut hazel in Hampshire where there remain good supplies of well-managed coppice, bringing the rods back to Stroud to be made up into hurdles. Oak butts into timber-framing branchwood and thinnings into firewood low grade coppice into bean poles, pea sticks and faggots, and the better quality stuff into hurdles. I am also selling firewood for the first time in an attempt to use everything that comes out of the coppice restoration programme. The timber-framing interest has shifted sideways to sawn oak in response to the lack of coppiced oak and the availability of larger butts from the Arboretum. When I moved down to North Devon, I started to look more at the local coppice materials (good quality hazel being hard to find down there) and began working with oak coppice and the building of small round-timber framed garden structures. Initially, my career as a coppice worker revolved almost entirely around hurdles and charcoal, but after a couple of seasons I dropped the charcoal burning and concentrated on the ‘cleaner’ crafts, expanding my repertoire to include gate-hurdles, post-and-rail fencing, wooden rakes, beesom brooms, tent pegs, shingles and laths: in fact, virtually anything that can be made from cleft and unseasoned wood. In 2000 I moved down to rural north Devon and remained there until early 2008. In both occupations I was able to work on my craft skills and, eventually, started doing demonstrations myself and then selling as a side-line and, eventually, running courses.Īfter some twelve years in forestry I decided to make the sideways leap into hurdle-making and became a full-time coppice worker in association with the Pang Valley Countryside Project in Berkshire. A number of years paid work in nature conservation in and around Oxford followed before I moved into full-time forestry. ![]()
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