This fire wood growing kit allows you to plant up 1 acre of land as an intensive coppice for maximum wood fuel production.
The yield from your field.
A well managed coppiced willow bed will produce between 1 and 1.5 kg of dry wood per metre square per year. An acre field will give you around 5-6 tonnes of burnable wood chips or logs and kindling (at 30% moisture). In energy terms this equates to 1400 litres of heating oil or 16,000 kWh of gas. This is roughly 8 tonnes of green unseasoned wood. The willow coppice will maintain high productivity for at least 20 years, and you can reasonably expect it to give an economic yield for 30-40 years . These figures are based on harvesting a quarter of an acre each year in rotation. You can produce & harvest logs without specialist equipment. The kit includes:
4800 12" biomass willow setts ( a mix of biomass varieties)
18 rolls of 100m x1m permeable woven ground cover fabric for weed control (note the lengths on the roll are +/- 5%)
3600 pegs to hold down the ground cover. (15cm plastic)
Detailed planting, growing and harvesting instructions
In fertile soil you can expect to harvest 4-6 tons of air dry wood per year. You will get this by harvesting quarter of an acre each year and allowing it to regrow for 3-4 years.
These logs will be suitable for wood burners, stoves and boilers. This should be enough to heat a well insulated and draught proofed 3 bedroom house.
We can send this kit out in stages to allow planting to be spread over the winter months.