Firewood coppice / pollard - short, thick stems

[sandspider]

Morning all.

 

Had a thought this morning - if I trim off the growing tips from coppice / Pollard poles, will the poles grow thicker rather than longer?

 

I'm aiming to coppice / pollard mixed species (sweet chestnut, willow, ash, robinia, eucalyptus etc.) for firewood, fence posts etc, so aiming to get poles of 10cm diameter or so. If I let the poles grow to say 2m long (with the stools reasonably well spaced) then trim off the growing tips, will the poles thicken without getting too much longer? (Ive got some electricity lines on my land so can't let things grow too high in some areas...)

 

Cheers.

[Pinkfoot]

They will ,but will also shoot more along the pole .

 

sent from my phone but never in work time.

[sandspider]

Hmm. Good point. Maybe not worth the extra trimming of side shoots.

[Pinkfoot]

You don't have to trim them if they are already bare.

If you tip them in the spring or late winter , they will feather up and you can just rub them off with your hands and leave a small head .

 

sent from my phone but never in work time.

[sandspider]

 

Might give it a try and see how it goes.

[openspaceman]

Had a thought this morning - if I trim off the growing tips from coppice / Pollard poles, will the poles grow thicker rather than longer?

 

 

In practise I don't know but logically this will only lose you the tip growth and as epicormic shoots will cease to be inhibited any replacement growth wood be on these new branches.

 

The thing is for any given combination of growing conditions and plants once the canopy closes the total yield of biomass is the same for a given area, also the height growth is related to this general yield per area. With a coppice stool this growth is shared between all the stems, so they compete with each other for height growth and the increment is shared between them. To concentrate the increment i.e. to get the increment onto fewer stems the coppice would be stored back to (normally) one stem.

 

Making fatter stems is the reason behind thinning in conventional sylviculture.

[sandspider]

Makes sense, thanks OSM. Will try a few different approaches...

[spandit]

Trying this with willow and it tends to sprout all along the trunk. Even rubbing off the new buds is futile as they grow back in very short order - just not feasible with multiple stems.