In praise of messy coppicing

I was recently told that my coppicing looked “messy”. I took this as a compliment as it referred to the piles of branches and log heaps that I am making, which provide sheltered habitat for insects, amphibians, birds, hedgehogs and mice as well as enriching the fungal content of the ground.

These heaps may look messy, but they are an integral part of the management plan for the woodland. An important consideration is the safety of the person who will be doing the next round of coppicing in 7 years time (hopefully me!). Log piles are potential trip hazards so they are always located downhill from a brush heap (the brush heaps will still be easy to see).

The brush heaps flatten down pretty quickly over a year or two as the branches decay and settle. A heap 12 feet high now will be only 6 feet high next year and then settle to about 4 feet where it will stay. This means that on the next Coppice cycle the same set of heaps can be added to - which will ensure that I don’t cover over any nice wildflowers.

Hibernation zones

Some areas around the meadow and strips of hedge bottom are left for the later flowering summer flowers (the main wildflower meadow is a spring meadow so cut in late July). The flowers (such as ox-eye daisy, common agrimony, hemp agrimony, borage, mallow and feverfew) have set seed, so these areas have been cut with the trusty Allen Scythe.

The cuttings have been pitchforked on top of 2 year old wood piles in the Coppice. I am hoping that this will give a layered environment with damp rotten wood at the bottom, then a dry lattice of dead branches, finally topped off with the protective ‘roof’ of straw like cuttings:

This looks like it will create a great hibernation place - sheltered with a variety of environments.

Long post to catch up

Long time since the last post - so a number of things to catch up on:

First is the results of the experiment in overwintering the borage plants wither in the green house ot outside. The results are clear: Kept in the greenhouse - 100% dead. Kept outside - 80% alive. Lots of planting out has been done of seeds that have germinated after being in trays all winter - again it seems that the trays that were kept outside and brought into the greenhouse at the end of February did best. I wonder if the moisture content is key. The higher humidity in the green house over the winter may lead to seeds rotting (there seemed to be mould on the surface of some of the trays kept in the greenhouse).

The jury is still out on the experiment of planting snake's head fritillaries in individual trays. They germinated very well (both those in the greenhouse and those kept outside), producing single grass-like leaves. However these disappeared in the early summer, at about the same time that the mature plants in the field also loose their leaves. I am not sure if the plants in the trays died, or if they have formed bulbs which will come up again next year. I have kept the trays moist over the summer and will keep them well drained outside over the winter - so it will be interesting to see if they come up again in the spring.

The wildflower meadow was superb in the spring, however after it was cut it has remained yellow throughout the summer as the drought stopped any germination or growth. interesting to see how this will affect next spring. The hay rattle was abundant so we collected lots of seed and spread it around the field, especially in some of the areas where the grass is still quite vigorous.

The trees in the woodland have suffered through the drought, with a lot of premature leaf fall, especially from the rowan and silver birch. The rowan had lost nearly all of their leaves by the end of September, but produced a large crop of berries - which might itself be a sign that the tree is under stress.

End of coppicing and spring in full swing

The Last of the clear up after coppicing is finished! Leaving piles of logs and brush scattered around is a great way of supporting fungal growth in the soil and providing habitat. The fashion for tidiness in woodland and burning any cuttings is not good for wildlife.

The last tree to be cut was one of the willows. As a pollard this will provide a much more interesting habitat than a straight up and down tree.

The bumble bees have been out and about for three weeks now. I wondered what they were feeding on as there are so few flowers out. I then saw the bees high in willow trees where these flowers must be providing the sustainable that the bees needed in the first few days of March.

Some additional construction of bug hotels has finished off the work in the woods. 

Oliver Rackham and a day of pollarding

 It’s such a rainy day I been reading Oliver Rackham’s book about landscape history. Interesting to speculate about what he would think about my woodland creation. Probably he would have been fairly negative about the biodiversity - and said that I would be much better spending my time in the restoration of a coppicing cycle in an ancient woodland rather than trying to create a new woodland. This was illustrated by the story of the woodland planted by monks 750 years ago which still doesn’t have as rich a flora as the adjacent ancient woodland.

Fascinating to read about how human activity has altered all of our environment, with echos of history in the patterns of fields, the hedgerows and woodlands.

Pollarding the willows.

Yesterday was Solent pollarding willows in the woodland. The branches are too high to cut with a chain saw, as using a chain saw at head height seems unwise. A hand chain saw is the answer, as the ropes either side of the chain allow us to be 10m from the tree being cut. However, it is a really good upper body workout!

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Darlac-Pocket-Chainsaw/dp/B002D18CU4/ref=sr_1_20?crid=1MB7G6496Y9DH&keywords=Rope+chainsaw&qid=1645395344&sprefix=rope+chainsaw%2Caps%2C56&sr=8-20

Pollarding creates lots of branches, as well as rotten wood good for insects and holes for nesting.

Expertise from Woodland Trust

 I have come across this recently published manual from the Woodland Trust - the "Woodland Creation Guide".

It is pretty detailed (more than 300 pages) and is definitely not 'light reading'. It made me start reflecting on what I would do differently if starting again today:

1) I would pay more attention to the edges of the woodland and not plant 'future big' trees (such as oak and beech) near the woodland edges. I am correcting this now by selective thinning - leaving the smaller trees (such as service, wayfaring, hawthorn) around the edges, but I could have saved myself some work by panning this from the beginning.

2) I would not use plastic tree protectors, plastic mulch mats and tannalised stakes. There is no good evidence that these additions make the trees grow better, and they will give long term low level plastic and microplastic pollution. I have tried to mitigate the negative environmental impact by constructing 'bug hotels' (see past posts) out of the tree protectors and stakes.

3) I would have planted less trees - I used 1m centres which is way too close. 3m apart if probably about right.

If you are thinking of planting a woodland this guide is a 'must read'.

A birding first and early signs of spring

A new bird for the woodland - a goldcrest being busy, busy, busy flittering around the old alder seed heads. This takes the total bid list for the woodland and wildflower meadow to 69.

Coppicing and thinning continues, but there seem to be some early signs of spring:

The catkins have been out for a couple of weeks, but today for the first time I noticed the tiny red female hazel flowers

Underfoot the bluebells are poking their heads into the leaf litter

There are leaves of Herb Robert showing:

The weather has been so mild that we are having a ridiculously early spring - we don't usually have to mind our footsteps while coppicing to avoid the bluebells. 

About halfway through coppicing

 Current work is all focussed on the coppicing. Removal of the underwood makes a huge difference to the look and feel of the wood. This is what the wood looks like before coppicing:

After coppicing there is much more light getting to the floor. 

Some of the larger trees need to be cut - removing the birch and pollarding the willow. As they are close together the trees don’t fall, so the winch is pretty essential to safely pull the butt of the tree so it can come to the ground to be cut and stacked. In this photo the hadn't winch (in the foreground) has a cable running to the right to a winch pulley (also called a diverter pulley, snatch pulley, snatch block or pulley block) attached to a tree with the green strop. This pulley bends the cable so that the tree can be pulled in the bet direction. The tree that has been pulled is lying on the ground top left, with a mound of earth in front of the butt which has been created as it is pulled along:

I am starting new brush piles in next year’s compartment so that I can plant bulbs in the new compartment this autumn without covering when next winters cutting starts. So these sequence in each of the 7 compartments of the wood is:

1) In winter 1: start the brush heaps using the cuttings from the neighbouring compartment.

2) In autumn: plant bulbs (such as bluebell, wild garlic and wood anemone) avoiding the brush piles

3) In winter 2: coppice the compartment - putting cuttings on the already located brush heaps so you know that you are avoiding your newly planted bulbs.

4) In spring: as bulbs come up for the first time there is lots of light for them in the newly cut compartment. 

I have 3 or 4 brush heaps for each half acre compartment. At the bottom of the heap I have put a pile of the large logs that are unstable for splitting (because they had branches coming off so have 'knots' in the wood). I hope that this will make a very nice habitat for amphibians:

The traditional method of woodland management involves use of the underwood - which had many uses in the past (wattles, posts, charcoal, firewood, stakes, pales, faggots, fodder, bark for tanning and many, many more). Today I only use it for firewood. The smaller wood is cut into 'cord wood' - traditionally 4 foot lengths, which I will cut into 4 pieces on a bench circular saw when coppicing has finished in the spring. The larger pieces have been cut into lengths with the chain saw - each about a foot long. Of course the wood does not from nicely in these dimensions so in practice length is variable around these dimensions:

Heaps of new accommodation

When I was working as a teenager with the Sussex Wildlife Trust conservation corps in the coppiced woodlands of West Dean Woods we used to burn all of the cut trees that could not be used for either firewood or hurdle making. Currently in the woodland I am piling the 'brash' into heaps.

                                            

This is a bit more work as all the wood and twigs needs to be heaved on top of the piles, but it has the advantages of providing habitat and having areas of rotting wood which I hope will enrich the developing Mycorrhizal Fungal Network which I hope I am creating under the ground in the woodland.

 

Mycorrhizal Fungal Networks are the unseen powerhouse of a woodland and take many, many years to develop. They link the trees and plants together and move nutrients and water around - having at some time been called a 'communication system' between the trees in a wood. Just planting trees does not create a woodland - which is why Oliver Rackham was so dismissive of 'compensatory' planing of new woodland for the destruction of ancient woodland. Those new 'compensation' trees will take many hundreds of years to develop into what we loose every day under the shovel of development.

Rapidly developing an underground hyphal network may be a forlorn hope, but the wood heaps do provide a great habitat for birds nesting (especially robins and wrens), amphibians (toads, newts and frogs), and all manner of bugs as a secure over-wintering site.

As the wood rots a large number of different fungi appear and the heap decreases in size by about two thirds over the year. I plan to re-use the same sites within each compartment so that I am not putting the news heaps on top of the wildflowers that I am try ing to establish. As I move down each compartment of tree coppicing I  re-use the heaps in the previous year's compartment, so each heap has wood over 2 years on top of it, then a rotting phase of 5 years in the 7 year coppicing cycle. I think that in the next cycle each heap will just be a pile of rotten wood, which will be a great habitat when a whole new pile of branches is put on top.