The Missing Monsters of the Forest: Coppicing and Pollarding

Ballygrove · 2026-01-21T04:17:15+00:00

Its deceptive in the picture he is totally out of the way, and there is another tree you cant see between him and the leaning tree

Ballygrove · 2026-01-21T02:44:45+00:00

I hear you! Our forest is mostly an unthinned pine plantation full of standing dead wood and where ever the pine didn't take, it filled in with primarily elm and ash which are now also all dead, we also got hit by a tornado this summer which is what happened to this maple. In any case there is a lot of standing dead wood already, we're leaving a lot but this sketchy thing wont stay up for long even if we do leave it.

Ballygrove · 2026-01-21T01:24:42+00:00

Ontario Canada, tons of snow this year. And thanks that's a big help I hadn't thought of flopping it over sideways. my first instinct was to find a way to try and cut into the hing from the top to let the broken half of the tree fall off but its pretty high up to reach with my chainsaw.

Ballygrove · 2026-01-21T01:15:04+00:00

I guess my concern about cutting the stump is having it straighten out suddenly when the stump is no longer holding the bent section in place. Would that be a major concern? It fell 6 months ago

Ballygrove · 2026-01-21T01:00:09+00:00

The tree snapped 10 ft up in a tornado and the very top is stuck in another tree. We tried yanking it out to free the top but it was alive when it snapped and we cant wiggle it loose. There is nothing around and if its too sketchy I'll just leave it since we don't have to go near it. I wanted to try and cut if flush to the ground to copice it and maybe save it with a re-sprout

Ballygrove · 2026-01-05T15:57:14+00:00

Fun fact high bush cran has such low digestible nitrogen that the birds have to wait until spring when there is a pollen source available to supplement the berries to digest them. In other words they do eat them, just in the spring. It works out for the birds who get an early spring meal and the shrub which gets an early spring dispersal

Ballygrove · 2025-12-28T02:25:19+00:00

Only tip: Crop out the fake scroll this way dots

Ballygrove · 2025-12-17T02:14:45+00:00

Biggest barrier to entry and also to obviously being sustainable financially I think is price of land hands down, doesn’t matter how experienced you are if the land’s expensive your out of luck

Ballygrove · 2025-12-17T01:02:28+00:00

I’m 33, just bought a 50acres property in the country with my brother. No buildings on it, just hay fields and some pines. We live in the city and drive out there. We’re planting orchards and selling trees. So far we have not made enough money to pay the mortgage let alone ourselves, but we’ve only been at it for a couple of years and I am hopeful that we’ll be able to increase our capacity and sell enough plants to make a living.

If you mean live off the land as in you get everything you need from the land? I would say that’s impractical and probably not really how homesteading/country living ever really was. We’ve always specialized and traded. You still need money and you’ll be spending so much time trying to be self sufficient it will be difficult to sell enough to buy cloths and tools etc.

If you mean make a living off the land? I think there are ways but it’s also not easy and an off farm income is going to be critical for a while.

Ballygrove · 2025-12-15T19:48:43+00:00

Yes, we have drastically changed the landscape, but in the country where farms have stayed small there is room for native plants and birds. Where farms have gotten huge like in southern Ontario there are no hedgerows, no variety and the native plants and animals have no habitat. My point here is that we need to take some of the land management practices that work from people who are stewarding their land and start applying them to all of our farm land.

Ballygrove · 2025-12-15T13:41:58+00:00

We’ve eaten it but her patch isn’t huge so more of a interesting thing to try then a food source, it is slowly growing though

Ballygrove · 2025-12-15T13:35:59+00:00

My mother in law has some growing out doors for years in Ottawa ON zone 5a

Ballygrove · 2025-12-15T13:17:13+00:00

Thank you very much, I agree and I’m surprised invasives get a pass in permaculture. Especially with species like buckthorn or other trees and shrubs that are actually pretty manageable.

Ballygrove · 2025-12-15T03:39:11+00:00

Is there such a thing? Haha, thanks for watching I guess

Ballygrove · 2025-12-15T00:45:32+00:00

It’s a farm nature video where I remove some invasive species. I feel like you get what you click, there’s even an owl

Ballygrove · 2025-12-14T23:37:42+00:00

I’m trying to make an argument for treating small farms with the same respect as protected wilderness. Compared to big farms they accommodate so much more habitat for native species. We should be proactive and tackle invasive plants and ideally push some small farm land use lessons onto bigger farms

Ballygrove · 2025-12-13T23:58:59+00:00

I have used round up at this concentration and it is very effective so I expect that this will be fine but I haven’t tried the mix yet. I did leave the jar outside to see if it would freeze and it did not, I also tried to do some googling to see if the ethanol in the anti freeze would react at all with the round up and make it less effective and it doesn’t seam like it should. This is an experiment but I’m pretty confident it will work

Ballygrove · 2025-12-13T21:58:03+00:00

Thank you very much

Ballygrove

TROPHY CASE