Some advise about coppice species please

[Chubbs]

Hello John K, thanks for the advise and information. It will be a 3/4 acre site and the intention is as you suggested to selectively thin as certain trees are a suitable size or becoming a problem shading others. The 'useable' timber would be nothing large but big enough for fence posts and small round wood carpentry projects, the rest to fuel the house stove.

There have been several replies to my post advising to plant the trees in blocks-I had not considered this, thinking a mixed positioning of species would be more resilient some how, this is also the reason for including 8 different species what with the various diseases coming to the UK. I assumed it would be a good idea to spread the alders around due to N fixing? Not included common alder in the mix due to site not being wet and hear that grey alder will cope with drier conditions?

The site is 181m above sea level and it does get pretty windy here (until our boundary hedge gets taller) the soil is sandy clay loam, well drained with no standing water, been used for sheep grazing at least for last 10 years, it's flat and diverse with plenty of clover etc.

Oaks, ash, beech and hazel seem to do well around here although ash die back is here.

I've also read that an ideal spacing would be 1.8M each way for coppice plantings, does this seem sensible? Do You work in forestry?

Many thanks for your help with this.

[Minnie]

Ok thanks Rover, will investigate Robinia

You want one of these :-) perfect for those coppicing jobs

[john k]

Chubbs there's some useful reading from the Forestry Commission here:

http://www.forestry.gov.uk/pdf/FR_BEC_Establishment_and_management_of_broadleaved_coppice_plantations_for_energy_2009.pdf/$FILE/FR_BEC_Establishment_and_management_of_broadleaved_coppice_plantations_for_energy_2009.pdf

 

How much firewood are you hoping to produce? Mixed broadleaves are likely to give you a yield of between 4 and 10 cubic metres per hectare per year. Your site is about 0.3 hectares so at the very best you're likely to get around 3 cubic metres of wood per year (maybe 4-5 loose cubic metres of logs). In practice you may find you struggle to get half of that amount.

[Chubbs]

Thanks for the info. John. If we can get 2 to 3 loose cubic meters per year, that should do us, we live in a 2 bed bungalow and only heat 3 rooms, all our hot water is from stove top too. We have 480m of established boundary hedge we will manage each winter which should yield 1 meter or so as well.

Thanks for sending the link but I couldn't access it for some reason.

The figures you quoted should come in useful, it's good to have a rough idea of yields-again it difficult finding the information.

 

Thanks again

[john k]

See if this link works

[gooseflight]

Thanks for the link. The non-working version led me to this page, which has some other useful stuff:

 

Guidance documents (Forest Research)