Big J

We have 30 hectares going in this year on two sites. Approximately 61 hectares on 6 sites next year. We're being fairly selective on sites, so generally low level, flat or nearly flat sites with euc species chosen according to the site conditions. Mostly nitens though.

Liverpool was once reknowned as the hub of the Transatlantic shipping industry. Infact, at one point it's reckoned that 15% of Liverpudlians worked for Cunard. The other 85% didn't work very hard at all.

Bryan Elliot has supplied ours, and through him we're looking to establish a local supply too next year, with initially 60k nitens being grown about 10 miles as the crow flies from us.

I think that there would be a lot of mileage in developing a quickly constructed, cheaply available, modular drying shed system for customers. 2m tall, 2m deep and 1m wide. Minimum two bays and add as many as you want. Training customers to cycle their own firewood so that they are working 12-18 months ahead (depending on where you are in the country) shouldn't be difficult, and almost everyone has space to have a 2x2x2m store (which will hold 8 loose cube if just lobbed in, or almost 12 loose cube if stacked). I bet a fair few customers would consider investing in a store (they need one anyway, why not give it the function of drying the wood as well as just storing it) if they realised they could save around £30/cube by having it straight off the processor. That's making the assumption that those of you selling for say £105/cube would sell for £75/cube if fresh off the machine. It's so simple. It's like having the entire food industry in the UK being served by the takeaway sector, rather than anyone bothering to cook themselves. Drying your own firewood is markedly easier than doing your own dinner, as it requires the exact same effort as taking a delivery of dried firewood. The only difference is sitting on it for 12 months (or less in the south).

Nitens won't, but there are other species (such as glaucescens) that will tolerate higher altitude and colder winters well. They like loads of rain too. Nevertheless, I wouldn't prescribe eucs for everywhere. My personal preference is to split UK forestry into three zones (with obvious exceptions, such as existing broadleaf woodland). Low lying, flat ground should in my opinion be planted with predominantly fast growing species such as eucs and poplar. Intermediate zones, with steep slopes and access issues should be planted with biodiverse, native woodlands, where harvesting isn't a key concern. Uplands should be planted with softwood, to provide decent structural timber. That way, we fulfill our needs for biodiversity, biomass and quality sawlogs. It is of course only my opinion.

3-4 times quicker

I drive different vehicles for different purposes. So general site visits are in the Berlingo, but if I'm towing, it's the Touareg. Even with a 16ft trailer, I always lose the game of top trumps with the tractor and muck spreader! Plus some people in cars cannot reverse to save their lives, so it's quicker to reverse your trailer than watch them battle to get a VW Polo 150m backwards along a straight and wide lane. That is referencing a real life example of someone I've met on one set of lanes outside Tiverton. Each time I met him he showed an almost complete inability to drive, and he crashed into me on the fourth occasion we met. No damage to my Sprinter (he mounted a bank, rolled into the van, rolled off. I was stationary, he was driving far too fast) but his car was badly damaged. The next time I met him, he was very sheepish.

It's classed as a general construction timber in Australia, but I think here wouldn't make anything more than c16 grade, which is the same as sitka.

Would goats be a more robust and less stupid alternative?

I really like poplar, but it's hard to make a case for planting it in many cases because it's energy density is relatively low. Beautiful tree though, and grows like stink.

Na na na na na na na na nitens! That's what we're mostly planting (euc. nitens). Along with a few other euc species in much smaller quantities, we'll have planted about 60k of them this spring. They grow faster than anything else that grows in the UK, produces decent quality timber for chip, firewood and sawmilling and looks nice too. Should be able to get 200k planted next year, or at least that's the plan.

We moved here mainly for family reasons, and I knew what the lanes were like. I was out with my cutter on a couple of site visits yesterday and he (without me knowing) kept track of how many times we had to reverse for oncoming traffic. I think he said it was 5-6 times. Either way, it is daft, but I don't see how they can economically upgrade thousands of miles of country lanes. More passing places would certainly help.

I agree entirely. Commercially drying firewood is not viable. This is why the customer needs to do it. The vast majority of people will have space to do so themselves, and those that don't will typically live in towns and cities and will have access to mains gas. Wood fuel is environmentally superb, but not if it's kiln dried.

Has anyone considered the monstrously high C02 cost of producing kiln dried firewood? I don't dispute that it's what customers want (principally because they're idiots) but I did a quick calculation some months back and the best case scenario for kiln drying logs is that the CO2 cost is 8 times what air drying is. I honestly think that if the public were aware of the environmental cost, it would be much less popular. Burning wood to dry wood that is for burning is fundamentally stupid. There is plenty of wood waste that is fit for burning to produce heat for industrial applications (like CHP plants, direct heating or kiln drying products where natural drying is unfeasible) and plenty of demand for that too. In the weather we've had this spring, you could have dried almost any hardwood to sub 25% in three months with decent airflow.

My opinion is pretty simple. Balls to selling moisture specified firewood. Sell it fresh, let the bloody customers dry it themselves. Most people have space to do so, and a tidy, nicely stacked woodshed is an aesthetic asset to any garden. Specifying hardwood or softwood? Pointless. Specifying moisture content? Ridiculous. Selling firewood? You've got more patience than me!! I fear I am not suited to dealing with the public. ?

No, but I suspect it was easier to get away with in earlier times.

That's one way of looking at it, I suppose. Regardless of the personal circumstances, his position is untenable. He may have been able to justify his actions to himself, but it's contrary to the deeply restrictive guidelines that he was (we can presume) an architect of. As I said earlier, do as I say, not as I do just doesn't cut it in modern politics.

I liked one I saw on Facebook earlier: " if you have to drive 260 miles to find someone who is prepared to help you in an emergency, you need to consider the possibility that you're a bit of a c*nt"

Interestingly, antibody testing suggests only 7.3% of people in Stockholm have had Covid 19. How is it London has seen a 17% infection rate with full lockdown whereas Stockholm has had less than half of that with minimal restrictions? https://edition.cnn.com/2020/05/21/health/sweden-herd-immunity-coronavirus-intl/index.html

Yeah, that bloody Brexiteer! I bet the EU tricked him into driving up to Durham, those fiends! ?

A democracy has real issues when those in charge start to say "Do as I say, not as I do" Cummings needs to go.

I feel the same ?

Or indeed in most of the other European countries. ?

Absolute merchant bankers. Well done for keeping your cool. I must admit the more time I spend driving around the West Country, the angrier and more impatient I become. I went to pick up some beams at a sawmill today for a friend and despite it being in a small town, there is no route into it without doing single track roads. So inevitably ended up reversing my trailer to let a lorry past, squeezing through gaps not wide enough and generally enjoying myself as much as having invasive surgery without anaesthetic. At least I didn't meet any horses ?

In the news this evening that preliminary antibody tests suggest that 5% of the population outside of London have had covid 19 and 17% of Londoners have had it. So that's 1.53m Londoners and 2.95m of the rest of us. So 4.5m infected with lets say an upper end estimate of 50k deaths (many of which could reasonably be said were patients that died with coronavirus rather than because of it). So that's a 1.1% death rate, which fits with the previous data. On that basis, I don't think it's severity warrants the level of lockdown we've experienced. The vast majority of those that have died have been either very elderly or with comorbities. We should shield them and the rest of us should get on with life as normal, with reasonable efforts made to limit direct social contact. Sitting in the nurses waiting room the other day, two of the people in there were so overweight and infirm, I was surprised they were still alive. Only in their sixties, I'd say, each of them 3 times their ideal bodyweight and struggling to walk. The best thing anyone can do in the interim period before a vaccine is developed is to try to improve their own health. I know not everyone can do that, but those at higher risk can really improve their own chances of not falling seriously ill by doing all the usual things to get healthier. Why anyone is still smoking these days is honestly beyond me. One of the simplest and easiest things to do to improve your health, especially given the nature of covid 19 attacking the lungs.