Larch price

[MattyF]

Another good example of this is land owners getting grants to do thinning and wood land improvement with rides ect and just making a few stumps or put in sub standard roads and pocketing the money... this happens a lot.

 

[Big J]

Just now, MattyF said:

Would you not say that is down to management, I thought to be a forester in Germany it’s earned through strict apprenticeship and training and in this country it appears any one can pick up a saw and have a hack about with little idea of what they are doing .. I think most of the forestry in this country is miss managed it has nothing to do with growing conditions, land owners expect to have trees that make them money with barely any input ,plant and forget and it does not work like that for quality timber... and then there are the idiots sitting on ancient woodland wanting to rip it out and plant Sitka ! Lad I know in the woodland trust was asked if there where grants to do this I kid you not!

To an extent, yes. But also no. 

 

As I said earlier, I've seen birch in Finland where it's simply grown as a weed on waste ground and has a form that is simply unobtainable in the UK. Similarly, scots pine in Sweden grows absolutely, completely straight. It just won't do that here. 

 

Management is certainly part of it, but the level of managerial input needs to be much higher here (I feel) and the results are far from guaranteed.

[Rich Rule]

Would the quality of the timber be effected by the seasons?

 

What I mean is, in Scandiwegia there is a distinct growing season and a cold winter.  I would guess similar in the PNW.

 

The UK is warmish in the summer and not exactly baltic on the winter.  Meaning they would grow quicker and of a lesser quality.

 

I am probably way off the mark here, but worth asking the question.

[Squaredy]

I think it is well known that the UK is simply a place where conifers grow very fast,  I remember reading years ago that outside of its natural range Sequoia grows faster in the UK than anywhere in the world.  And of course fast growth does not generally equal quality timber.

 

And of course as has so often been said UK forests are so often neglected.  I know an estate near here (an estate that made its money from Coal mining in the industrial revolution) which owns several thousand acres, much of it is planted with conifers, and none has been managed this century.  The owner simply has the view that there is no money in it, and focuses on the various properties he lets instead.  So the hundreds of thousands of trees he had planted in the seventies and eighties are over-crowded, weak and knotty.

[Khriss]

Plus Larch gets so high, then flips its top over just as you turn your back on it. Management is the key which UK is sadly lacking  in any industry you care to name. K

[Stere]

Thought alot of birch in UK was downy supposedly less useful