Coppicing Red alder

Hi crew!

So someone once told me “you can coppice red alder as a young tree but after it grows older, it will kill it”, something like that.  And through the fog of memory I believe they said that cut off point was something less than 5 years old.

Anyone know this for sure? I am planting 400 alders a year to build soil, replacing with fruit and nut trees as I go, and have a bunch of 4 year olds that I am wondering if I need to do something with now if I want to keep them in a coppice system.

Plan is to chip for mulch  (tractor PTO unit I have) these, I know they’re a bit young for firewood.

Thanks

Here's an older thread on red alder that I found helpful:
https://permies.com/t/27872/Red-Alder-Alnus-Rubra

I'm buying a piece of property that has a bunch of red alder that is 6-8" in diameter, in a small, swampy patch of woods that needs thinning, and planned to coppice them all. It looks like most are too old for that. But they'll be fine for firewood and hugelkultur beds, so I'll cut them anyway and monitor young trees that come up (which they inevitably will, LOL).

I was searching for the same information and came across this paper https://www.fs.fed.us/pnw/olympia/silv/publications/opt/176_DeBellEtal1978.pdf. Perhaps it will help.

Thanks both ya! That helps a lot. Looks like 4-6 years to coppice. I’m also going to leave some and limb some up and experiment with all those growing tree crops in close spacing with the alder (and other species).

Yeah since I posted this I’ve been diving into a lot of info on syntropic farming/successional agroforestry and it seems that these systems are more well developed in the tropics but I’d like to try something like this here in the PNW with alder being an important species.