Pruning silver birch

[Mark Bolam]

I’m pretty sure my grandparents ate one once.

[Rich Rule]

I had a Toblerone last week.

 

The missus flew back from Deutschland and grabbed one at the airport.

 

It was lovely.

[Mick Dempsey]

[Ty Korrigan]

Hello,

I'm no big tree hero these days.

How about a thin?

I try to keep any reduction cuts to a few cms but most birches I get to work on have been previously butchered so often the regrowth from a rot pocket is impractical to climb.

[Dan Maynard]

That cut is the picture I would love to show customers why not to half their silver birch, that decay will go down a long way inside the stem too.

[Dan Maynard]

2 hours ago, Mick Dempsey said:

Who really ate Toblerones? (Apart from Alan Partridge)

 

 

I saw them on the top shelf in Sainsbury's the other day and wondered the same thing - who is buying those in a supermarket? Airports only, surely.

[coppice cutter]

3 hours ago, Ty Korrigan said:

Hello,

I'm no big tree hero these days.

How about a thin?

I try to keep any reduction cuts to a few cms but most birches I get to work on have been previously butchered so often the regrowth from a rot pocket is impractical to climb.

Having read the report by the University of Alaska on the potential damage done to the trees, it's another reason why, having done it unknowingly once, I wouldn't tap any trees again for birch sap when there's no need to.

 

https://scholarworks.alaska.edu/handle/11122/3198

 

They are especially sensitive trees.

 

 

Edited September 4, 2022 by coppice cutter

[coppice cutter]

4 hours ago, Mick Dempsey said:

I reckon before the growing of sugar in the New World it was very rare and expensive to get something sweet to eat or drink. So a bit of even mildly sweet birch juice would have been very welcome to our forefathers.

Hard to know how they perceived things back then before everyone's taste buds were shot to hell by monosodium glutamate.

 

After a bit of a health scare a few years ago I had to give up sugar in my tea and using any extra salt at the table.

 

How my taste in food changed over the following couple of years was pretty dramatic to the degree that most processed or takeaway food now tastes akin to poison, but I still like a bit of home baking so even my taste buds are still hugely corrupted by modern life.

 

So it's a fair point, something which seems essentially bland in our present time may indeed have been perceived differently back then.

 

Then again, rivers and streams would have been pretty much unpolluted so would they even have bothered, is there any record of it having been done hundreds of years ago I wonder. 

[CABennett]

3 hours ago, Ty Korrigan said:

 

That looks really good. Must be a real nightmare to climb and get out to the sides of the crown. I'll probably try thinning out the middle and then use pole pruner keeping the cuts to about 3-5cm. I don't enjoy pruning if I'm honest, much prefer removals/felling which is why I try to outsource pruning jobs. 

[Ty Korrigan]

2 hours ago, CABennett said:

6 hours ago, Ty Korrigan said:

 

That looks really good. Must be a real nightmare to climb and get out to the sides of the crown. I'll probably try thinning out the middle and then use pole pruner keeping the cuts to about 3-5cm. I don't enjoy pruning if I'm honest, much prefer removals/felling which is why I try to outsource pruning jobs. 

I've never gone in for creating balls out of trees.

I respect the skill but it is an unnatural and unecessary look.