What do you do with your brash?

[Rich]

Hi there,

A very exhausted Rich and Penny here! We're almost there with our first bit of coppice, finished cutting last weekend, and got the posts up for the deer fencing finished on Saturday, (boy is that a job!).

Anyway what we did with our brash (and it was a bit of a learning curve)...

We really didn't want to burn it, it seems like such a waste, and also the bluebells and wild daffs are just coming through plus other surprises, unknown unknowns if you like, which might see the light of day if we avoid incinerating their habitat...hopefully!

So the plan was to hire a chipper to make compost and a woodchip path for the veg garden. We dragged a load of brash out into the paddock to make space for the chipper. Once the 13hp monster arrived we realised pretty soon that it was all growl and no bite, it made the most awful fuss over a couple of twigs and we soon calculated that the coppice would grow quicker than we could ever chip, thus committing us into an unsustainable cycle of wood chipping for eternity!

So the toothless monster went back to the hire company and we started shifting brash...again! This time we decided to reinforce our deer fencing with a brash hedge, this seems like quite a good use for it as in the coming years it will gradually return to the woodland and be an excellent source of fuel for the storm kettle. So having moved our brash around quite a bit more than we wanted, (there are far better hobbies!) we finally found a solution for it. We discovered 2 things: shifting brash is far more tolerable an occupation when you’re making it into something like a hedge, and never underestimate how much of the stuff you will get!

Now we were hoping to chip the old dead chestnut which was hungup from the storm in 87, dry as bones and would have been excellent for a long life woodchip path, but now I guess we’ll have to buy it in...unless anyone needs to get rid of a load or has an underemployed chipper on steroids with big shiny teeth!

Cheers

Rich and Penny

[tracy]

Well done you guys!

Don't worry about dragging stuff around, we have all done it and learned the hard way. Never move a piece of wood twice is the theory! We are learning each year about how much we can get ready in advance, so that the wood/ brash can do directly to its final resting place. It happens...

Sorry about the chipper, sounds like a waste of money - hopefully someone can advise on that.

First year we burnt most of our brash, we saved some for wild life piles which worked really really well and the birds love it.

Second year we made dead hedging out of it. A great success with the birds already! As we were coppicing up a ride, we stacked the brash along the edges behind the bits that we cut. Saved a lot of time and be really nice for the woodland....

[Darren]

I get load of Spruce brash which is as much use as a chocolate tea pot. It's surprising how much a acre can produce. If we did'nt burn it we would end up with a mountain of the stuff. If we did'nt it, it would just get in the way of clear felling. I always pile the hardwood brash for camp fire. I might charcoal another mound of it.

[greyman]

We're just putting that finishing cuts on our half acre of hazel coppice - we left the ditch top next to the main ride/footpath to deter people from wandering - and I have grandiose ideas of having a go at continuous weave fencing to about a metre and then top that with plastic deer fence - ha-ha I hear you cry! We also have to move some of our windrows to get to the last bits - we had nowhere to line them up except next to the last cut. Having done a bit of this sort of thing in the 90's - if I have to move it I do a bit of 'processing' so that at least there is less to move the next time. Anything around 1 1/2" and above is going for charcoal in our 5' purchase from Toby in Herefordshire and even stuff around an inch is going to be saved for camp fires and the small kiln - see Nov 08 archive - articles 'making-a-charcoal-kiln-by-Sean'.

As the previous 'coppicing' was pretty poor and there's been no deer protection the number of 'bean pole' stems is low.

We have had the blue bells coming through for some weeks then the celandine's poked their fragile leaves through but this weekend we had wood anemones in flower on the bank as well as the odd primrose too.

Greyman