Winter

Winter – Firewood, forwarders and coppice coupes

Well it’s been a while since we posted a blog on the site so we thought it was time to tell you what we have been up to since the end of the show season.

We have of course still been selling at both Winchester and the former Bishop's Waltham Farmer's Market, but most of our time has been spent in the woods coppicing and producing firewood.

It has been a good year for us on the firewood front with sales up to December up on previous years despite the warmer weather we have had this winter. For the past 4 years it seems that more and more people have been opening up chimneys and having stoves installed.

In the 10 years since we started working in the woods we have mainly been carrying out small scale coppicing in areas with restricted access. With this in mind we bought a compact tractor and 1 ½ tonne forwarder from Riko UK based at Bordon. This unit has been and still remains a wonderful tool within the coppice, however in the past 3 years we have been cutting much larger timber in neighbouring woodland. We have now taken delivery, again from Riko UK, of a brand new, British built JMS forwarder trailer and Crane. With a 7 tonne capacity this means we can move larger amounts of timber in one go.

This year we are cutting two areas of coppice, one in the north of the wood and one in the southern half. Both areas are very overstood. One area is predominately ash (good firewood) and hazel and the other hazel with standards of oak.

Due to the lack of cutting both areas are going to take several cycles (7-20 years) to recover and improve. We know from talking to some of the older Hampshire Coppice Craftsmens group members that the last time that most of it was cut was 1964.