Click to return to Home page
 
The Resource

Faggot making in the woods
Faggot making

Painting by Morris Berd, 'Nature Study' (1947) Morris Berd, Nature Study (1947)
“On the continent of Europe, where natural regeneration methods are traditional, the problem was generally solved in the past by permitting peasants to cut the unwanted sticks for fuel. Where the faggot is still in use and where an inherited forest sense among forest-dwellers guarantees a satisfactory operation, this provides an ideal solution. In Britain and other countries lacking either or both these conditions, other methods must be found.” (Natural Management of Woods – Continuous Cover Forestry – J.E.Garfitt 1994)

It is wrongly assumed by the vast majority of people in the UK (excluding us peasants!) that all trees, whether planted or self-sown naturally, have to be allowed to grow in to BIG trees. We are a population raised on images of rainforest destruction in the Amazon, and the demise of the Orangutan habitat in Southeast Asia, caused in the main, by our demand for beef and oil. In the UK, we can appease this beef/oil forest-guilt with the Tree Preservation Order and the right to protest when trees are felled in our own woodlands, and when conifers are planted on the sides of mountains.

If we accept the fact that most of our native hardwood species would benefit from regular cutting – coppicing – and that plantations that have been cleared of pine can, in most cases, regenerate naturally, then we can begin to develop woodland management policies which create jobs, and provide the right type and size of woodfuel needed to gain real wood/heat/energy efficiency. When the public, in general, come to terms with the fact that we don’t need to fill our woodlands and plantations with BIG trees then progress toward the expansion of a sustainable fuel resource can be dramatically advanced.

There are, of course, reasons for growing BIG conifers in the UK: they provide the building industry with poor quality timber from which it can build poor quality housing! In order to obtain big conifer trees one has to grow and harvest a lot of little conifer trees along the way, which end up as poor quality fence-posts, wet fuel (in the form of woodchip), pallets, sheds that last for 12 months and chipboard that holds new houses together!

Big trees demand the attention of big machinery, lots of oil, energy, time, handling, pain, mess, noise and hold lots of water. They demand energy to process them into planks and beams, and given that the desire and expertise exists to build very good houses from straw and hemp, and IKEA have met our demand for furniture from other, more developed, forest nations within the EC, then perhaps the time of the big tree is coming to an end? Cutting big trees for firewood is nothing more than madness, but it's still the norm in our broadleaved woodlands today.

Details of our approach to growing firewood can be found at www.carbon-synq.co.uk
PAR-CHAR and The Coppice Stove are registered UK trademarks (2565580 & 2569855) owned by Black Mountain Woodfuels.
All prices include VAT& Delivery.
© BMWF 2011

This website is best viewed using any web browser other than Internet Explorer - for instance Firefox, Opera, Safari or Chrome. Why? More why.