coppicing

Rene Caignard, Faggot-Maker

“I used to make fifteen thousand faggots a year. I would work with my uncle;
he would cut the wood and I would bundle the faggots. We didn’t make them just for
ourselves, we toured the farms in the area. Each household used about two thousand to three thousand faggots a year – it depended on the [...]

Coppicing and Faggot Making

Given that so much is said about sustainable energy resources, it is perhaps surprising that the ancient art of faggot making is more in the public eye – until forty or fifty years ago, millions of people across Europe used faggots to fuel their homes and their businesses, without causing any depletion of energy resources [...]

Tree Care

This hazel was coppiced four years ago and could now be cut again to provide pea sticks and stakes for the garden.
In some parts of the world December is a month in which there is not too much to be done in the garden, but not so in Brittany: now is the time to work [...]

Coppicing

It is remkable how little one reads on the subject of coppicing in modern literature. Not so long ago, coppicing would have been one of the main Winter activities of people living in this area – and one of the main sources of wealth. Coppicing involves cutting down trees such as ash and hazel in [...]