I'm quite excited about tomorrow's hazel planting. Establishing a new native species coppice woodland is not commonly done today. People plant broadleaved woodlands for sure, but the criteria is often a generally assumed benefit to nature and while the planting of any tree is commendable, I have sometimes felt that opportunities for sustainable future timber production have been missed. In my first years working in the glen we did quite a lot of planting under the very popular native pinewoods scheme that the Forestry Commission ran.
Meggernie pines
This scheme was aimed at enlarging the overall area of Caledonian Pinewood in Scotland and involved either the natural regeneration of relic fragments of these ancient woods or new planting in suitable areas. This new planting was what provided the employment and in short involved planting pines (grown from Meggernie seed) on the drier sandier knolls and mixed broadleaves elsewhere. We planted Rowan, Birch, Hazel, Ash, Cherry, Willow, Holly, Juniper and Alder amongst other things and I recall having an interesting chat with the forest manager about planting them out in same species groups closer together than the recommended 3 metre spacing with a view to future timber production. The conversation ended with a realisation that we were (in the strange way that you can) planting a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and that both this and a lack of any access to the plantations could hinder future timber production.
Future timber production from these plantings simply did not appear to be on the agenda as indeed it still is not in the majority of broadleaf planting perhaps the equation is Conifer = timber, broadleaf = nature, but I beg to disagree and with what we are doing tomorrow hope to put my money where my mouth is by planting with a purpose. That purpose being the provision of timber and small round wood on a continual cycle, a cycle that will link our actions with those of our Celtic ancestors and even their Neolithic forebears.
People since time immemorial have used wood - whatever they had to hand usually to make the things they needed, fire, boats, shelter, weapons, fire, a bit more fire. We know this because we have seen badly drawn pictures of these people using these things in museums and books.
Anglo Saxons using small round wood - note the wattle and daub wall, loom etc. Note also the strange absence of criss-cross sandals so common in these pictures -perhaps in the wash on the day this scene was painted?
Coppice would have been a common, pretty essential practice for these people, after all if it was good enough for the Romans.... One needs only to look at the tools of today's Coppicer to see a link with the past, indeed you would probably have to go quite far to find something as obviously medieval in origin and still in use today as the Billhook with its multiple regional forms.
There is a thriving market in these good quality old tools as interest in coppice is rekindled. I recently bought myself a left bevelled billhook which I have been using in Coppice Experiment 2. I managed to get a properly fearsome (almost cutting the hairs on the back of your hand)edge on it and find it excellent for cleaning poles and cutting to size. It is also a pleasant tool to use, no engine noise or fumes disturb you in the woodland as you work away, in the footsteps of your ancestors.
Whether these people planted trees or just coppiced natural forest is uncertain. What is certain is that tomorrow we are planting with a purpose and you are welcome to join us.
In March we were successful in our application for 300 hazel trees to plant at Loch Archie as a future fuel supply. Those trees are now here and a date has been set for planting them, Friday the 28th of May. The full moon the evening before will hopefully make for an energetic start as we quite literally plant a form of energy. One that with proper management will long outlast many generation of us.
Coppicing is believed to be the oldest management activity undertaken by humanity, pre-dating agriculture and the more I read of it, it seems to be just about the most sustainable one we do as well so no surprise it's so out of fashion now. Perthshire has a long documented history of managed coppice, primarily oak,ash and hazel for industries that either no longer exist or that now use oil based chemicals. Plastic becoming widely available in the 1950's did for a lot of traditional pole producers and saw a big decline in people coppicing for a living.
We will get a variety of benefits from the hazel's and so will the associated flora and fauna, but this wood is primarily for burning to replace oil. It can be hard to realise how productive hazel can be in a coppice cycle, so I have here some photos of Hazel from an inspirational website-
http://www.hazelwoodlandproducts.co.uk/coppice-management.htm
After 1 years growth.
2 Year Old Hazel Coppice
3 Year Old Hazel Coppice
5 Year Old Hazel Coppice, producing lots of hazel nuts.
10 Year Old Hazel Coppice
As you can see, this chap has some amount of potential firewood. If you look at the trees there and imagine 30 such trees, converted to logs and in your woodpile a smile will probably spread over your face. When you think on a little and realise that you will be (if you wish) cutting the same amount next year and the year after and the year after that and that this small planting at Loch Archie, a relatively small strip of land into which we will plant just 300 trees, could yield this indefinitely. If you cut a tenth (30) of the Loch Archie hazels every year, by the time you finished cutting your last "Coup", the first cutting would be ready to go again- ad infinitum as it were.
What a truly magical low impact fuelwood system. I have been told that coppice can outperform Sitka spruce in many ways and this renewable aspect certainly makes it so to my mind. If you cut a tree for firewood, the tree is gone and you must plant and grow a new one before you can do get firewood again. With coppice, the firewood grows while your back is turned. You don't even have to say Abracadra it just does it- providing you can control your herbivores of course.
Before our hazel can begin the cycle in the pictures it will need to become established which takes a few years. As little as 3 on good lowland sites, perhaps a little longer on ours. Once in the coppice cycle however the hazel stools can live for an extremely long time and be consistently productive.
So why not join GWI and the smiling happy children and teachers of Glenlyon Primary School for a mornings treeplanting on the 28th and be part of this wonderful cycle. Bring a spade if you can.
My thanks to Hugh Ross at Rawhaw woods for letting me use his photos for this blog and well done to them for what they are doing and creating.
http://www.hazelwoodlandproducts.co.uk/coppice-management.htm
The feasibility study has numerous tentacles concerning the supply of woodfuel. Being surrounded by timber does not necessarily mean that it will be a doddle getting it to people. A primary consideration for me at the start of the project was how to obtain enough timber to maintain a constant and hopefully growing supply of fuel for people changing from oil to wood as their primary heatsource. It was obviously important that this would be done in a sustainable fashion and there are various forest harvesting or production techniques that lend themselves to this.
But how to do it? The big how to here is called extraction by the way, and it has been challenging foresters for a long time. In the case of GWI it is all intrinsically linked to the type of boilers being used, (wood)chip or log boilers being the options available.The fuel for both of these can come from the same tree which is good, but how do you get the tree out of the woods? How much of it can you get out?What infrastructure needs to be in place for that to happen?, How much will it cost per ton and because we are short of space for drying; how dry could it be when it came out?
A further complication in Glenlyon is obviously terrain, in particular steep sided slopes. I am sure that some boffin somewhere will have worked out a table calculating economic loss in forestry plantations per degree of slope and I don't think its hard to see how that could be the case. Cost and conservation are the watchwords in this case.
For example: lots of forest harvesting and extraction these days is done very efficiently by machines such as harvesters and forwarders.
A Forest Harvester can cut up to 60,000 tons of timber per year.
However these machines can only work on a certain degree of steepness, beyond that, more roading must be put in at more cost and that of course, can only happen following approval from various bodies, which creates a time delay, which costs more money. Remember all this timber you are harvesting has very probably not been thinned and due to elevation, exposure, and thin mountain soils is consequentially likely to be of low quality and thus low value.
I have been quoted between £350 and £500 per day for the hire of a forwarder and Operator in Glenlyon, so you can see from that how quickly costs could add up. Particularly because depending on the type of harvesting you are doing, you may not have the option of stopping an uneconomic operation without rendering the half felled site liable to potentially disastrous and even more uneconomically viable windblow.
Given that there is very likely to be a demand for chips, lets look at one option we considered earlier on in the project for supplying them from the steep slopes no one else wants. Whole tree extraction by Skyline.
A skyline or cable Crane is best thought of in terms of being like a cable car or gondola that people going skiing might use.
The same principles of cables going up and down a slope carrying a weight can be used to extract timber from slopes with a spar tree being used as a top anchor point for the cables. Around 1910 in the early days of forestry in British Columbia, a skyline system called "High lead" was developed which kept the logs off the ground, by suspending them in the air for their whole journey down the slope. Back then it saved power and was swift, today it makes Skylines a good option for reduced ground pressure from extraction. The high lead system involves a high spar tree for the cable to run to and from. The felling of these makes for some of the most incredible photos of Canadian logging.
Yes, the picture on the right really does show a man (Big Bill Moraski) standing on top of a spar tree with his arms out. These pictures are from a time before Photoshop.
You can the feller hanging on as the tree top is felled. This could apparently "set the spar tree lashing back and forth in a 20-foot arc".
So was this our plan, to stand on top of big trees with our arms out, then axe blades whirling produce enough timber to meet the needs of the glen?
Err not quite, the plan was to buy a 2nd hand converted excavator cablecrane for a bargain price locally, use it to produce a large stockpile of fuelwood timber over a few months , process and start drying the timber, repeat as needed . The option was particularly tempting given that the machine could still perform large excavator duties, such as making forest roads or loading bays. It could also potentially be fitted with a log grapple or processor head making it a multi-purpose machine that would be useful not just to us, but could probably be hired to others in the glen for digger jobs.
A lovely cab for the operator, note the all important winches at the back and skyline boom extension at the front.
There could have been great advantages for GWI from doing whole tree harvesting for chip production. An approximate third more produce comes from harvesting the foliage and you also leave a tidy forest floor for replanting or for safe future operations. Unfortunately someone else spotted what a bargain the machine was and unlike us could just buy it on the spot, whereas we would probably still be applying for grant funding for it as I write.
It was good though, having the experience of considering using such a machine, thinking it through and consulting with a very experienced skyline operator on it. He gave me lots of interesting thoughts and advice and said of the project " With all the timber here, how could you fail" which was really encouraging.
I am now looking at a totally different machine which is a little dearer, but new. I shall write of this at another time. Note; The Canada photos come from the excellent book " The Lumberjacks" by Donald Mackay.
Last week I carried out the first of GWI's Forest assessments. These assessments are intended to provide GWI with research based data concerning the suitability of a forest for inclusion in or use by the project.
A key component of the feasibility study concerns the provision of a reliable and sustainable supply of fuelwood for use in the glen. The wood currently standing in coniferous plantations up and down the glen could probably meet our needs for a very long time, if it were to be managed with firewood resource as a key management objective.
It is however one thing looking at a forest and saying; "There lots of timber in them woods, you mark my words"(a finger may be also pointed skywards at this point). It is another matter altogether to measure how much timber there may actually be.
Lots of timber
This involves having knowledge of the mystic science of Forest Mensuration. Gaining such knowledge was perhaps the most boring bit of all the boring bits of forestry school. However once learnt and equipped (Clinometer, girth tape,distance measures, hard hat with visor etc) one can potentially survey, and then estimate the volume of any given forest. There are various ways of doing this according to the age, value and previous management of the forest.
In the case of Upper Mirkwood with it being a single species (Sitka spruce), fairly homogeneous looking planting and me just looking for a rough idea of volume, I decided to put in 10 sample plots, randomly scattered through the woods. Each plot will have a radius of 5.64m (0.01ha)and within that radius all trees over 7cm will have their DBH (diameter at breast height) recorded and the top height of the tree with the largest DBH will also be recorded. Sounds fairly easy eh' - One question. Have you ever been in unthinned Sitka Spruce?. I would guess that most people have not and that the few who have, have either left soon going "This stuffs horrible and spiky and jaggy and its really dark in here and oww I've just been jagged in the eye" or they have gone "Oh well, better get the mensuration done, oww, just been jagged in the eye- this Sitka must be the extra spiky kind etc"
The grim reality behind the green front line of a Sitka wood.
Each tree (in a sample plot) over 7cm mid diameter is measured with a girth tape "hug" that involves embracing the tree. Often the Sitka hugs you back, leaving affectionate little scratches on your hands and arms. In this wood the tress are not growing particularly fast and there are some areas where there has obviously been a problem with deer, as a result the canopy is just closing. In other areas the canopy has closed successfully and the competition for light has begun in earnest. Both for the trees who will fight for it all their lives and for me trying to read the girth tape in the dark.
I really cannot understand why more people do not enjoy walking in these woods?
For the purposesof the project I am particularly seeking areas adjacent to roadside or on flattish accessible ground. This is mainly because it will be a lot easier to extract timber from these areas. You have to start somewhere and a thinning going back from the roadside is a good place, not just for access reasons but also because the wind corridor that can be your forest road gains a more windfirm edge to protect the interior with. Mirkwood is an upland plantation and eventually I emerge, blinking in the light like a coalminer.
Quite often in these plantations you will find the remains of old Sheilings or come across old roads or tracks. I have found little of that in here, but when I come out onto the top of the woods I find a few Sheilings, as always they are near to water.There are Stags on the open hill behind me and the weather looks a little changeable.
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