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Firewood

My wrist

Last spring I had a bad fracture in my left wrist, had surgery to put the fragments together, and then got the bombshell advice to avoid use of vibrating machinery like petrol chainsaws from now on. As you can imagine, that’s a life changing injury in my case. Since then I’ve been working out what to do and getting as much advice I can including from my physiotherapist. I’m planning to make posts about how I carry on managing Century Wood and I hope it will be useful for other people who are dealing with injuries and conditions like arthritis.

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Gathering firewood

Yesterday I took the tractor and trailer round to gather some piles of firewood I’d felled and cut up in January and February. Some of these were right next to the rides and easy to get to, but a couple were way off any of the rides behind tangles of brambles and fallen branches. Despite this, I was able to get the tractor in by finding a roundabout route since it’s narrow enough to get through gaps and has enough power to get over smaller logs and stumps.

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Taxing death

Since the new Labour government’s Halloween horror show budget last month, the farming sector has been in turmoil. Up to now, farms have mostly escaped inheritance tax on land and equipment, with a mixture of Agricultural Property Relief (ARP) and Business Property Relief (BPR). Suddenly, they are faced with a 20% tax on death after the first million pounds. They’re being told to give their property to their children, make sure they don’t die within seven years (or they will still have to pay inheritance tax), and find some way to fund their remaining years because if they carry on running the farm as before then HMRC won’t accept it has been given away at all. Or set up some complicated and irreversible trust or company structure to avoid it, with consequential and ongoing fees to accountants and solicitors to make sure they don’t fall foul of the ever changing tax rules, and hope the government doesn’t kick the stool away from that too next year.

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APF Exhibition

This week I went to this year’s APF Exhibition for the first time, held at Ragley Hall south of Birmingham. The APF is the UK’s largest trade show for forestry and woodlands, and has been running every other year since the 1970s, apart from a COVID break in 2020. Hundreds of exhibitors and tens of thousands of visitors. With £80 million of equipment on display last time, the emphasis of the event is naturally on “Big Forestry”. However, there are also areas for traditional woodland crafts including pole lathes, charcoal burning, and horse logging. Several major competitions are hosted by the event: in chainsaw carving, pole climbing, forwarder driving, and fence building. And there are stands for the Forestry Commission, the Royal Forestry Society, the Small Woods Association, and the National Coppice Federation. I managed to talk to quite a few people and also took the photos below.

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The Drying Barn

The Drying Barn at Century Wood has made a big difference since I put it up in 2018. This post shows how the barn was built and then some pictures from September after another good tidy up of the stuff it “accumulates” – like garden sheds do, almost by themselves.

These two pictures show the Barn as it is now and one of the sketches I drew in January 2018 before I started. It’s next to the Log Cabin in the Glade at the centre of the wood.

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Cutting hazel for firewood

One of my aims for 2021 is to be more organised about firewood, now that we have a wood stove at home too. I’m concentrating on the hazel that grows in the thin shade of the plantation poplar trees, since it’s a better firewood, and coppices well so it’s an easily renewable source. This post has some photos and a bit more about my plan for it.

First, here’s a slider comparison showing before and after pictures of one of the hazels on the edge of the Glade at the centre of the wood, which I cut this month.

Since I established the Glade, every few years I’ve cut back overhanging branches like this when they start to encroach. The next picture shows a close up of what the hazel looked like afterwards, with the thicker stems cut for firewood, a few smaller stems cut for overhanging, but most of the smaller stems left to thicken up. The cuts are sloped to tip the stems over in the right direction. I make brash piles out of the ends of the thicker stems, which are good for wildlife but here help define the edge of the Glade.

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Firewood numbers

There are a lot of numbers associated with firewood and I’ve tried to collect best estimates relevant to small woodlands, here in one place, along with enough context to use them. They’re not a substitute for what you actually see in your own circumstances, but they’re the kind of thing you need if you’re putting together a woodland management plan, prior notification for a drying barn, a business case, or even deciding roughly what you can do.

Wood stove. Used with permission.

I’ve organised it in the same order as the firewood processing sequence: how much grows per year, what lengths to cut, when to split, how drying works, how much heat different species produce, loose vs stacked, and bag sizes.

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