After our grand tour these past five years, 2013 is family Beale’s year of settling, observing and preparing. We do have a long list of jobs but we can’t get them all done at once and we know that we need to plan ahead and prioritise rather than get stressed out about a mountain of work. I’ve also been working away a lot (not for much longer though, woohoo) and this has meant little time to get to the woods and get work done there too, much to my disgust.
![](https://bealers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/wp_20130208_001.jpg?w=300&h=225)
Come January and the whole 2012/2013 coppicing season being missed I was pretty urgent to have moved the woodland project along a bit so I ordered 600 willows as a practice plot for the wet not-much-useful-for-anything-else land that makes up the majority of our holding. The idea being that if they take ok then over the next 5 or so years we’ll plant up a large part of the land as a firewood coppice.
The trees sticks came quicker than expected and were then sat for a week in a large trug filled with water to promote root growth. I had 5 varieties. The plan being a large practice firewood – sorry ‘Biomass’ – coppice and the final 100 as a small trial basket weaving bed, the latter being planted much closer together to keep them skinnier.
![Don't do this, it's bloody stupid.](https://bealers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/560225_10200463197210539_345121004_n.jpg?w=300&h=225)
Our – mine and a mate, Mel – first attempt was snowed off, we just got one fence post in the ground. Attempt 2 a week later got all 500 of the firewood sticks in, as well as 2 further days to get the surrounding fence sorted (this would have been a single day’s work for 2 people, instead it was one day each between Mel and myself). The fence proved to be essential as we didn’t use guards (too expensive) we figured on a single boundary to stop the rabbits.
![Mel's awesome fence](https://bealers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/wp_20130302_007.jpg?w=300&h=225)
We left the sticks for a few days whilst we got on with other things, like earning money, and on next visit just 3 days later there were already signs of rabbit damage!
The final half day was with the entire family and we planted 100 odd sticks in a morning whilst lunch was in the slow cooker at home, using cardboard as a mulch.
It was a more expensive exercise than I’d expected:
- 600 trees @ £450 though at the end of year one we’ll cut them all back (to promote multi stem growth) which should give us 3000+ more trees if we want them
- Fencing material at £100. This was very low budget: VERY cheap & will immediately rust chicken wire, and all the fence posts were home felled & pointed. We definitely need some serious investment if we’re going to plant up 18 acres. This test plot was only 30 m2
- 6 days labour spread between 2 people with a guest star appearance from the Beale clan at the end. This would be a lot quicker next time and the fencing is definitely the biggest job.
We ended up with the following species mix
for the basket weaving bed:
- Harrisons x22
- Flanders Red x21
- Triandra x44
- Q83 x18
- Viminalis x15
and the much larger firewood bed:
- Viminalis 10 rows of 27
- White Tip 4 rows of 27
- Q89 4 rows of 27
Let’s hope the rabbits don’t get them all!
![Grow baby, grow](https://bealers.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/wp_20130303_015.jpg?w=1024&h=768)