It is again that time of the year when, whenever the weather allows it, I have to cut and prune all the trees in my garden. Above all, the coppice. If I wait a bit longer, the trees start to pump sap into the wood, and it will be more difficult to cut, as well as the cuts would be more dangerous to the trees. I am not doing a full harvest this year, but I did cut most of the maples and some of the thicker poplar and willow poles. Together with the pile of raspberry and Symphoricarpos twigs, it looks impressive when piled up.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

You have already seen the front pile. The middle pile is the poplars and willows, and the rear pile is the maples. It looks big in the picture, but it is not much wood. As I said, the first pile is not worth much as firewood and thus will be mostly shredded and used as mulch. Today, I started de-branching the other two piles, and the work is progressing slowly.

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Some of the thicker and straighter poles will go towards growing beans over the summer, and thus they will be processed into firewood in the fall. The rest will be cut into ca 50 cm pieces that fit whole into my oven. The thinner twigs will also be cut into 50 cm pieces or shredded into chips, depending on what is easier. These are dense enough to be worth burning (together with the thicker Symphoricarpos twigs), but I might use them as mulch too. It depends on the amount.

And a little cross-over with the self-sustainability posts:

© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.

Each time a poplar or willow is cut, they sprout an overabundance of thin twigs in the spring. Most of them die off in the same year due to overcrowding and overshadowing. I am currently thinning these dead twigs because they make other works, like mowing grass or even walking through the coppice, difficult. But if I had rabbits, guinea pigs, sheep, or goats, these could be pruned in early summer when still green and fresh and fed to them. They could also be dried up as “tree hay” and fed to them in winter. This is, in my opinion, the main reason why an omnivorous diet would beat a vegan diet in the self-sufficiency game, because only herbivorous animals are capable of converting inedible plant material into edible protein, thus utilizing slightly less land overall.

I am currently using my coppice as a vegan would. It is a conscious choice on my part – I am not attempting full self-sustainability (I do not have enough land for three people anyway), and the additional workload connected with having to care for the animals is not worth it to me personally. So I am buying all my animal products, and I concentrate on maximizing the plant-based outputs of my garden.