#Coppice and pollard plus

in addition to building soil! Coppicing is fantastic at providing this type of harvest on a regular cycle and makes it easy to stack functions.

#Coppice and pollard plus

Plus you can get wood for rocket ovens, rocket mass heaters, camp fires, trellises, etc. The idea is to basically do chop-and-drop on a large scale to quickly build soil by adding leaves, twigs, branches and even logs to the ground each year on a rotating cycle. At least 1 of these will be a nitrogen fixer and the other 2 will be picked for biomass production. I'm currently designing my food forests to have 1 to 3 coppiced trees for every 1 fruit or nut producing tree. There are a lot of ways to use coppicing on your homestead that go beyond getting firewood. If you are going to do much coppicing I highly recommend getting 1 of your own (links in the blog post). For Father's Day this year my wife got me my own bill hook and I'm really looking forward to using it! The bill hook makes removing the branches and twigs from the logs so much easier. While in England I learned how important having the proper tool for coppicing is. But once they are big enough I can't wait to start setting up wattle fences around my homestead! I have planted around a 1000 trees since buying my homestead almost 3 years ago but the trees are still too small for wattle fences.

I also just love the look of wattle (woven) fences! Those fences were common place in England and I just fell in love with that type of fence and I can't wait to create some on my homestead.īut my homestead is lacking in trees. If done right you could even increase the diversity of wildlife that the landscape supported. I had grown up seeing logging as being something that was not compatible with a healthy natural environment (which to be fair modern logging approaches are often very damaging to the landscape) but coppicing was a method that could maintain a forest and repeatedly harvest it for generations without needing to replant. I also got to see old trees that had been coppiced for over 1000 years-these trees had lived far longer than that type of tree normally would without being coppiced.Īll of this was just amazing to me.

I got to see first hand how the understory of a mature forest could be managed as a copse with the regular harvesting cycle resulting in a more diverse set of habitat than would normally exist. While there I got involved in a youth ranger program which was my first introduction to coppicing. Back almost 9 years ago my wife and I got to live in England for a year.