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Grow
Your Own - Energy Independence
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Firewood stack
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“It is now possible, and economically viable, to grow
a lot of firewood on a relatively small area of ground. Black Mountain
Woodfuels has developed several systems of woodfuel production based
on established principles of short-rotation-coppice.”
(Growing Short Rotation Coppice - Defra Publication PDF file)
During the past thirty years scientists and plant breeders in the EC and USA have developed strains of Willow (Salix spp.) and Poplar (Populus spp.), which, 4 years after planting, can produce between 7-10 tonnes of wood from an acre of land. Government grants will contribute toward the establishment of this crop in most regions of the UK.
Most of the published data relating to the use of short rotation coppice encourages machine-based harvesting cycles for woodchip, which is then burned in expensive, and often inefficient, boilers. The fact that an ‘energy’ crop takes so much energy to process means that there is unnecessary waste: The Coppice Stove has been developed to reduce these wasteful practices.
The Coppice Stove has been designed specifically to operate on sticks! This is what you get when you grow short rotation coppice; however, there is no need for mechanical harvesting and there is no need to chip the sticks! An acre of fast growing willow may have more than 60,000 sticks on it, and while cutting them by hand may sound somewhat daunting, take it from us, in a world based around speed, it is quite enjoyable to take a day-off to cut your own fuel. Once the fuel has been cut it is bundled (an act that maintains the noble art of ‘kydding’) and then stored to dry, which takes a lot less time than drying logs!
Black Mountain Woodfuels is able to supply willow biomass cuttings, selected from some of the most vigorous strains being grown in the UK. These cuttings can be planted anytime from October to March, the best time being between December and January – providing the ground is soft enough.
We don’t offer multiple choices, preferring instead to offer a pack of 1200 x 30cm cuttings, 300m of black cloth to suppress weed growth and enough pegs to hold the cloth down. This pack costs £1500.00 inclusive.
We plant willow at 5000 cuttings per acre, which means that 1200 will cover about a quarter of an acre. We could sell you 5000 cuttings, but if you were sensible, then you would use what you buy from us, plant it, let it grow for 12 months, and then cut the crop to produce your own cuttings to plant a larger area without any extra cost. You can go on doing this until you cover the world, if you want?
Just one thing: after a few years we would like you to take a dozen of the largest and longest sticks that are growing in your willow bed (holt) and stick them in the ground to a height of about 6 feet, planted at about 8 feet apart. The following year you can cut the regrowth from the top of the stick and then leave it to grow into a pollard. The oldest trees in the United Kingdom are pollards that have been cut, continuously, for more than 1000 years.
Contact: biomasscuttings@redpigfarm.co.uk
If you are fortunate enough to have a couple of acres of ground available to grow woodfuel, then you are in a position to not only benefit from the opportunity to grow your own woodfuel for warmth and water, but to produce electricity for your own use as well.
Black Mountain Woodfuels is actively encouraging landowners to lease land to facilitate the communal growing of woodfuel. If you own enough land to share and are looking to develop a more sustainably sound means of generating a good income from your generosity then we would encourage you to contact us to discuss the economics of this proposal.
Contact: fuelshare@redpigfarm.co.uk
Managing Woodland for fuel:
(Growing Short Rotation Coppice - Defra Publication PDF file)
During the past thirty years scientists and plant breeders in the EC and USA have developed strains of Willow (Salix spp.) and Poplar (Populus spp.), which, 4 years after planting, can produce between 7-10 tonnes of wood from an acre of land. Government grants will contribute toward the establishment of this crop in most regions of the UK.
Most of the published data relating to the use of short rotation coppice encourages machine-based harvesting cycles for woodchip, which is then burned in expensive, and often inefficient, boilers. The fact that an ‘energy’ crop takes so much energy to process means that there is unnecessary waste: The Coppice Stove has been developed to reduce these wasteful practices.
The Coppice Stove has been designed specifically to operate on sticks! This is what you get when you grow short rotation coppice; however, there is no need for mechanical harvesting and there is no need to chip the sticks! An acre of fast growing willow may have more than 60,000 sticks on it, and while cutting them by hand may sound somewhat daunting, take it from us, in a world based around speed, it is quite enjoyable to take a day-off to cut your own fuel. Once the fuel has been cut it is bundled (an act that maintains the noble art of ‘kydding’) and then stored to dry, which takes a lot less time than drying logs!
Black Mountain Woodfuels is able to supply willow biomass cuttings, selected from some of the most vigorous strains being grown in the UK. These cuttings can be planted anytime from October to March, the best time being between December and January – providing the ground is soft enough.
We don’t offer multiple choices, preferring instead to offer a pack of 1200 x 30cm cuttings, 300m of black cloth to suppress weed growth and enough pegs to hold the cloth down. This pack costs £1500.00 inclusive.
We plant willow at 5000 cuttings per acre, which means that 1200 will cover about a quarter of an acre. We could sell you 5000 cuttings, but if you were sensible, then you would use what you buy from us, plant it, let it grow for 12 months, and then cut the crop to produce your own cuttings to plant a larger area without any extra cost. You can go on doing this until you cover the world, if you want?
Just one thing: after a few years we would like you to take a dozen of the largest and longest sticks that are growing in your willow bed (holt) and stick them in the ground to a height of about 6 feet, planted at about 8 feet apart. The following year you can cut the regrowth from the top of the stick and then leave it to grow into a pollard. The oldest trees in the United Kingdom are pollards that have been cut, continuously, for more than 1000 years.
Contact: biomasscuttings@redpigfarm.co.uk
If you are fortunate enough to have a couple of acres of ground available to grow woodfuel, then you are in a position to not only benefit from the opportunity to grow your own woodfuel for warmth and water, but to produce electricity for your own use as well.
Black Mountain Woodfuels is actively encouraging landowners to lease land to facilitate the communal growing of woodfuel. If you own enough land to share and are looking to develop a more sustainably sound means of generating a good income from your generosity then we would encourage you to contact us to discuss the economics of this proposal.
Contact: fuelshare@redpigfarm.co.uk
Managing Woodland for fuel:
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Faggots 
12 month old Alder coppice |
It doesn’t take a combustion expert or an expert in woodland economics to prove the fact that small diameter logs are more efficient to cut, prepare and burn than either split logs or woodchip. Neither does it take experts to point out the benefits, in terms of both biodiversity and financial viability, of growing small trees and coppice for fuel.
This is what you need to do if you own a piece of broadleaved woodland in the UK with big trees in it, and are interested in growing woodfuel, for the future, efficiently: the general rule of thumb suggests that your trees (broadleaved species only) are less likely to sprout new growth from the cut stump if they are more than 40 years old. This is almost always the case with beech (which does pollard very well), however, in our experience, trees of almost 70 years old can, in some cases, regenerate from the stump after cutting.
You need to pollard a couple of your big trees and cut a couple of others down to the ground. Use the wood how you will (but don’t burn it straightaway!), wait until the following summer and assess the results of your effort. If you have regrowth that shows signs of being pruned then get yourself a gun (humane) and Google 'how to cook venison'. If you have mass regrowth, as so often happens with Ash, Sweet Chestnut and Hazel, then take a step back and consider a plan that requires a lot more cutting. If you don’t have any regrowth from the cut stump or bowl then consider group felling and natural regeneration, before replanting. If you need more detailed comment then we would point you to 'Woodlands' by Oliver Rackham (we could never better the wisdom). There are Govt. grants that will support your effort.
If you have a Coppice Stove or a Bath Stove (or are wisely considering buying either – or both) then your woodfuel needs to be no more than 3 inches in diameter. Most broadleaved species will take between 3-15 years to reach this size, however, and herein lies the unique beauty of our stoves: they will run on sticks that most broadleaved species produce after three years – you just have to cut & bundle them! The opportunity to create an ecologically rich pattern of structurally diverse woodland should not be passed by – it is a unique, springtime experience unrivalled anywhere else in the world. This section assumes you have bought/or own a wood to manage rather than pickle?
Managing Hedgerows for fuel:
“One extreme of hedgerow
management is to do nothing and allow the hedge to grow into a row of
trees, as is usual in the United States. The other extreme is to give
the hedge a hurried mechanical trim every year, as is regrettably usual
in England and Wales. In some areas, such as Essex, there is a long tradition
of coppicing hedges as if they were woods.”
Oliver Rackham – 'The Illustrated History of the Countryside'.
Hedgerows are linear woodlands, and in a lot of cases, have sat stable for up to a thousand years (see Hooper’s Hypothesis). In some parts of the UK, hedgerows connect up small plots of woodland, which enable the migration of woodland species to and from quite wide areas (Bluebells, Dormice, etc), and their place in the landscape is undeniably crucial for ecology. A hedge is no different to a line of coppice stools, and, as with coppice, the stools will have been processing and storing carbon, in many cases, for hundreds of years.
A hedge, in the first year after cutting, will produce as much re-grown leaf area for photosynthesis as a ‘tubed-tree’ planted 15 years earlier. Take a 200 metre length of hedge x 2 metres wide and it won’t take you long to realise that you are looking at as many trees/stems as you will find in a hectare of newly planted ‘woodland’!
Estimates of how much hedgerow there is in the UK seem to vary from 300,000 to 700,000 miles, a figure which does not include urban hedging. For the purpose of this calculation, we have suggested that there are about 450,000 miles (720,000km) of hedgerow in the UK, as it stands today (July 2011). If we suggest that there are, on average across the UK, 1500 stems per 200m of hedgerow then, potentially, we have the equivalent of nearly 4 million hectares of under-utilised woodland!
These hedges could be providing 500,000 tonnes of fuel wood a year. If hedgerows are given a monetary value then the farmer/owner has an asset, and this asset is worth maintaining for the future/pension. Our hedgerows may be home too more than 70 million trees!
In some parts of the UK, a 250 acre farm could contain up to 10 linear kilometres of hedgerow. Such a resource, if managed to regular cycles, instead of neglected to mechanical flailing, could yield up to 10 tonnes of woodfuel a year (depending, of course, on the age and density of the hedges). This yield could generate up to 8000kW of electricity, using a wood gasifier. Similarly, this much wood could heat your house and hot water for between 9/12 months.
It is possible to suggest that 500,000 tonnes of hedgerow wood could generate 430 million kW of renewable electricity, annually!
Oliver Rackham – 'The Illustrated History of the Countryside'.
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 Hedgerows |
Hedgerows are linear woodlands, and in a lot of cases, have sat stable for up to a thousand years (see Hooper’s Hypothesis). In some parts of the UK, hedgerows connect up small plots of woodland, which enable the migration of woodland species to and from quite wide areas (Bluebells, Dormice, etc), and their place in the landscape is undeniably crucial for ecology. A hedge is no different to a line of coppice stools, and, as with coppice, the stools will have been processing and storing carbon, in many cases, for hundreds of years.
A hedge, in the first year after cutting, will produce as much re-grown leaf area for photosynthesis as a ‘tubed-tree’ planted 15 years earlier. Take a 200 metre length of hedge x 2 metres wide and it won’t take you long to realise that you are looking at as many trees/stems as you will find in a hectare of newly planted ‘woodland’!
Estimates of how much hedgerow there is in the UK seem to vary from 300,000 to 700,000 miles, a figure which does not include urban hedging. For the purpose of this calculation, we have suggested that there are about 450,000 miles (720,000km) of hedgerow in the UK, as it stands today (July 2011). If we suggest that there are, on average across the UK, 1500 stems per 200m of hedgerow then, potentially, we have the equivalent of nearly 4 million hectares of under-utilised woodland!
These hedges could be providing 500,000 tonnes of fuel wood a year. If hedgerows are given a monetary value then the farmer/owner has an asset, and this asset is worth maintaining for the future/pension. Our hedgerows may be home too more than 70 million trees!
In some parts of the UK, a 250 acre farm could contain up to 10 linear kilometres of hedgerow. Such a resource, if managed to regular cycles, instead of neglected to mechanical flailing, could yield up to 10 tonnes of woodfuel a year (depending, of course, on the age and density of the hedges). This yield could generate up to 8000kW of electricity, using a wood gasifier. Similarly, this much wood could heat your house and hot water for between 9/12 months.
It is possible to suggest that 500,000 tonnes of hedgerow wood could generate 430 million kW of renewable electricity, annually!
| Red Pig Farm, Bethlehem, Llandeilo,
SA19 9DR, UK
web: www.redpigfarm.co.uk email: woodfuels@redpigfarm.co.uk |
| PAR-CHAR and The Coppice Stove are registered UK
trademarks (2565580 & 2569855) owned by Black Mountain Woodfuels.
All prices include VAT& Delivery. |
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©
BMWF 2011 |
