Welcome to The Wild Croft

Charcoal! This has been a long time coming but I`ve finally built a charcoal retort so we can make charcoal from croft coppice wood.

The design I used was a Hookway retort, designed by James Hookway who I met at the NCFed gathering a few years ago demonstrating his design. He sells plans and I got someone to fabricate the stainless inner and then I built the rest mostly with bits I had lying around. As you can see my fabrication skills leave a lot to be desired, maybe I should stick to wood! But it works.

First firing yesterday went really well and I opened the barrel today to find some lovely charcoal. The retort uses scrap wood to indirectly heat the barrel with a rocket stove design. Once up to temperature the wood gives off volatile gases as it converts to charcoal and these are fed back in to fuel the fire. This makes it very clean and efficient compared with more traditional methods, and is well insulated with vermiculite to keep the temperature up. It`s also an amazing sound and sight!

Watching videos online I was expecting flames coming out of all sorts of unwanted spots but my extra efforts to seal it up well with fire rope, insulation and flour paste seemed to pay off!

Of course this is a bit small to be making charcoal commercially and we don`t have enough spare coppice wood at the moment anyway, but it`ll give us enough for ourselves and to share.

Eventually I`d like to use gorse for charcoal, as apparently it`s extremely good and burns every hot (and we have an unlimited supply of that!)

I spend a lot of time rambling on about coppicing and how we`re using it as a management method for our croft woodlands. Now we`ve written a whole case study about just that! So if you want to read a bit more detail about the how`s and why`s of our coppice systems, and see a few more pics too, then check it out.

Just search online for the Reforesting Scotland Hub and you`ll see our coppice case study up there, along with a few others that are worth a read too.

This is part of a project by Reforesting Scotland (which I`m involved with) to document existing coppice sites across Scotland to show what`s out there and build up a picture of how and why folk use coppice. These can then hopefully be used as inspiration and a resource for budding coppice projects. Search for the Scottish Coppice Network to find out more or follow links in the case study.

Workshop update! It`s been a slow burner this one, juggling with croft jobs and @timbertunnel builds, but we`ve finally got the cladding finished and have made a good start on the inside too. Thanks to Aurore, Ike and Dylan for their help!

Still to do are electrics and workbenches inside but it`s already been amazing having a decent space to work in. It`ll also be connected up to the old workshop with a canopy at some point.

We`ve almost doubled our solar capacity too with the extra roof space, now with over 8kw of panels, which should give enough energy to power the house and heat hot water most of the year, and surplus to charge the car on sunny days.

Thanks to everyone who came to our second croft woodland workshop on Saturday. It was lovely to show folk around and chat about trees in the sunshine.

We`ll hopefully have a few volunteer days over the winter in the coppice and harvesting basketry willow so sign up to the newsletter on our website if you`d like to hear about those.

We got off lightly with last week`s storm, with just a few branches snapped, but along the road from the house some chunky willows had come down and were hung up on phone lines (pun intended) and other trees.

So, it was a great excuse to finally buy a long pole saw and we made the most of the free bounty, chipping most of it plus a few firewood logs. The chips will have a higher nitrogen content than usual as they have leaves in with them, so ideal for composting. I`ve layered them with grass clippings, sheep`s wool and chicken manure.

On another note, there`s still 1 space left on next Saturday`s woodland workshop if you fancy a tour of our croft woodlands. Booking via our website.

Processing this year`s firewood in the #timbertunnel. I`m loving the log saw I got last year. It runs off the tractor which is outside the tunnel to keep the noise and fumes away.

I stack the smaller stuff to dry and pile up larger bits to split later. This will be left to dry until next Spring.

We`ve still got a few more spaces left on our woodland management workshop on the 16th August if you`d like to learn more about our coppice systems on the croft (as well as basketry and much more!). Booking is our website.

Back out in the coppice to check on regrowth. This is the area cut in winter 23 and doing really well. Flowers and other plants are coming up too with more sunlight hitting the floor.

I`m also starting to bring in the logs to process from last winter and loving my new mini log trailer from TCF Engineering, perfectly sized for my 1970`s Kubota and the narrow tracks into the coppice.

Thanks to everyone who came to our first woodland management workshop at the weekend. We had a great time showing folk around our croft woodland and chatting all things trees.

We`re hoping to run the day again later in the summer for those who didn`t get a spot this time, sign up to the newsletter on our website to be the first to know.