An Idiot's guide to Ancient Woodland management

[Gary Prentice]

8 hours ago, the village idiot said:

Is it just me or are advent calendar chocolates always curiously disappointing?

You need to get out more to see what's going on in the rest of the world. 

 

 The internet is 'alight' with complaints cos Cadburys advent calendar contained Bounty's behind the first two doors  

[the village idiot]

7 minutes ago, Gary Prentice said:

You need to get out more to see what's going on in the rest of the world. 

 

 The internet is 'alight' with complaints cos Cadburys advent calendar contained Bounty's behind the first two doors  

What an outrage! I hope these people can gain access to the appropriate counselling services to help get their lives back on track.

 

The World has some truly momentous challenges to overcome. Too much coconut for comfort is not one of them.

[The avantgardener]

Hi TVI, I took a photo today of the Oak Coppice in the woods that I am ride widening in, just a phone shot.

The Woodland is 110acres of coppice, mostly Sweet Chestnut with Oak standards, apart from this 10 acre English Oak coppice.

The Oak is tanning oak, the bark peeled and used at a nearby tannery, the wood used for charcoal.

There is another pure Oak Coppice just down the road in Bexhill, this is an even rarer habitat as it is Sessile Oak, it has qualified for SSSI status.

The only Oak Coppice known in the South East.

[Stere]

Whats the rotation time for oak coppice?

 

Is that stool ready to cut?

 

 

[The avantgardener]

The Woodland Trust have owned the site for 25 years and it has never been cut in the time that they have had it. It’s hard to say what the rotation cycle on this particular site would have been as the wood grows really slowly here. The soil is very thin over sandstone, has a high elevation and exposed to the winds off the sea, it is a cold wood overall.

A large Sweet Chestnut stand that was coppiced 25 years ago looks more like 10-15 year old coppice in other parts of East Sussex and Kent.

[Stere]

If  overstood for too long   may it reduce chance of it regrowing?

 

Also always wondered how old are the oak trees are when then first coppice them ....

[The avantgardener]

16 minutes ago, Stere said:

If  overstood for too long   may it reduce chance of it regrowing?

 

Also always wondered how old are the oak trees are when then first coppice them ....

If any coppice is overstood for too long the main problem that develops is that one or more of the stems collapse and shear the stool apart, or they blow over and uproot in the wind in the heavier biased direction.

There are plans to cut a section this Winter and monitor how they respond.

I think on this site the maidens wouldn’t have been cut for at least the first 30 years.

[the village idiot]

Thanks for the picture avantgardener. Woodland Oak coppice is quite a rare sight.

 

We've had little success in our Wood. If the Muntjac don't get the regrowth, the mildew does.

 

We've got one large specimen in the North of the Wood. I don't know if it was originally coppiced by man or mother nature.

 

[the village idiot]

FIREWOOD. (Long post alert!)

 

There is a view among some that Woodland resource ending it's days as firewood is a shame and somehow a bit wasteful. We do not subscribe to this view at all.

 

In recent years it has been the demand for firewood that has driven the increase in management of many more broadleaf woodland sites, including ancient woodland. It is not just wildlife and the rural economy that benefit from this, it also helps the planet. Any displacement of fossil fuel use by wood helps massively to stabilise and ultimately reduce atmospheric carbon levels. Firewood, especially if combusted in efficiently burning stoves and boilers is a very good thing.

 

Right from the start of my woodland management activities firewood has been my mainstay in terms of revenue generation. Almost 100% of my income comes from firewood sales. Without this market being available and thriving the management of the wood would not even come close to being financially viable. Sustainable woodland management would likely only occur in sites owned by wildlife trusts and exceedingly green minded private owners.

 

As the firewood threads on this fine forum show, there are a hundred different ways to set up an effective firewood operation. We produce around 600 cubic mtrs of split product a year with no firewood processor. Are we crazy? Almost certainly, but there is method to our madness. I'll attempt to detail our thinking and our process below.

 

The path you choose to take with your firewood operation will be largely dependant on the size and variety of kit that you can afford to purchase/hire. There are people out there who make do with a chainsaw, an axe and a battered old pick up. If you are going large scale though it makes sense to equip yourself with some extra machinery to take the strain off your body.

 

When I first started out all I had available were my trusty Husqvarna 346, Antonio the work shy tractor, a small craneless timber trailer and a small horizontal 8ton electric log splitter.

 

The Process:

 

After you have felled an area of woodland you are left with a scene somewhat like this:

 

 

I had no means of extracting logs of this size so resorted to ringing up the lengths 'at stump' (where they fall). The 10 inch long rings were then roughly split with a maul and placed into cages made of stock fencing to begin the seasoning process:

 

 

During a dry spell in the spring I would hand ball the logs into my little trailer and extract them over the small bridge to my processing area. From the trailer the wood was then split down further and thrown into double height stock fencing cages to continue seasoning.

 

 

This methodology produced wonderful logs but the amount of handling was unsustainable in the long term. Firewood production was increasing year on year and I had to get a bit more mechanised.

 

The first change was to switch over to fully vented cubic mtr bags. This made handling much easier, including with loading the logs onto lorries (all my firewood is wholesaled). Below you can see an early picture of Steve on the horizontal splitter loading a vented bag held open with a frame made of pallets. We of course never bypass the two handed safe operating system on the splitters. What you think you can make out in the picture is simply an optical illusion.

 

 

We have since ditched the pallet frame and gone over to builder's trestles. These are brilliant for holding bags in place and slot neatly into the long sides of a standard pallet.

 

Our next improvement was to have our cordwood extracted by contractors with proper forwarding trailers. This saved a huge amount of time and unnecessary handling. We started with Chris Howard's compact set up but now use John Shipp with his bigger kit. This costs money of course but free's up your time for splitting more logs.

 

 

The cordwood was all stacked at our processing area where we ringed it all up out of the stack. This was probably my least favourite job in the woods. Cutting out of a stack is a real ball ache.

 

 

 

So, we had streamlined the extraction process, but ringing up out of the stack was not a practice we were keen to continue. Two seasons ago we asked John to stack all the cord wood one log deep on bearers. This took up a huge amount of ride edge space but did make the ringing up a lot easier, especially with a cant hook on standby.

A cant hook is a long bar with a pivoted hook on the end, it grips a long log and uses leverage to roll it over.

 

Last season we had a bit of a breakthrough. We were thinking about how easy it would be to ring up the cordwood if each log could be lifted up to waist height. The perfect machine for this is an excavator with a log grab attachment. We hired in James Gadd (a local contractor) with his bobcat and timber grab for a few days to test the principal. I don't have a picture with the grab, but below is an image of James with a flail attachment that we also had a play with.

 

 

 Ringing up with the help of the excavator was a revelation. In no time at all you are left with a sizeable heap of rings ready for splitting.

 

 

James was too expensive to use for all our ringing up, but I was so enamoured with the process that I went straight out and bought a grab of our own. We then hired in an excavator to finish off the rest of our stacks.

 

Filled bags are moved around with Sally and a forklift mast attachment (one of my better purchases!) You can see the trestles holing a bag open in the background (behind the bbq, which no woodland operation should be without.)

 

 

After a few months of splitting we accumulate quite a healthy collection of finished product.

 

 

Fingers crossed the video works.

 

 

So why in the name of all that's holy have we not gone down the firewood processor route? There are a few reasons.

 

We have been to many machinery demos and have not yet encountered a machine that can produce logs of the consistent quality that we want. We have very high standards! 

 

A firewood processor is somewhat limited in the size and shape of the log it will accept. With our method all logs can be dealt with in the same way.

 

To use a firewood processor to it's maximum efficiency you ideally need several other pieces of additional kit (log deck, loader, elevator, second tractor etc.) We do not have the funds available for all this ancillary equipment.

 

These are all reasons why we have shied away from a processor, but the main one is simply down to job enjoyment. When making purchasing or operational decisions we almost always prioritise job enjoyment over maximum productivity. Steve and I both love spending the summer on the quiet electric splitters listening to audiobooks and podcasts. The splitters are powered by a diesel generator sited a long way from the work area. This creates a very pleasant environment in which to work, and an opportunity to broaden our minds. A scenario that would be much more difficult with a noisy tractor and processor right next to us.

 

A processor set up works very well for most large scale firewood producers, and they would probably consider our methods bonkers. Each to their own I say.

 

We have tried vertical splitters but actually find our compact horizontal splitters considerably more user friendly. The 'compact' is key here. Most horizontal splitters are a bit too long, the ergonomics slowing down the splitting operation significantly. Our little splitters only have a maximum of 8ton splitting force, we have always found this perfectly adequate.

 

I chose early on to wholesale all of our firewood. We sell to two local firewood merchants who do all the deliveries. We obviously take a significant hit on revenue per bag with this arrangement, but Steve and I are both keen to spend as much time in the Wood as possible over the winter, rather than be trucking around the lanes of Suffolk dishing out logs. One of our wholesale customers collects the bags himself, the other gets the logs delivered to his base via lorries loaded with the alpine/forklift combo.

 

Every woody person I have spoken to sets up their firewood operation in a different way (from us and from each other). A good general rule is too try to limit log handling as much as possible. I personally would add to this that it is important to ensure that you are enjoying the process too. It is difficult to sustain and be successful with a process that you dread the thought of doing.

 

 

Edit: Forgot to mention that small diameter logs, generally those that don't need to be split are processed on a circular saw bench. This is easily powered from Sally's PTO.

 

 

Edited December 12, 2019 by the village idiot

[Steve Bullman]

Thats some operation you have going there