Permies Poll: Do you coppice and/or pollard on your homestead?

According to the Oxford Languages Dictionary

Coppice - an area of woodland in which the trees or shrubs are, or formerly were, periodically cut back to ground level to stimulate growth and provide firewood or timber.

Pollard - cut off the top and branches of (a tree) to encourage new growth at the top.

I have been coppicing a maple for use as trellises in the garden. It takes two to three years to get them to a useful size.

My current pollards are all mulberries. I just need to keep those shorter for harvesting.

On a very limited scale. I periodically pollard the peach trees since the longer branches break off anyway. I coppice one mulberry and use the branches as tool handles.

I have a couple of unidentified shrubs that I coppice. Primarily, I just prune where it's needed, and use those pruned portions for whatever seems appropriate.

I have just begun with alders and willows.  I was going to put something about it in the aging homesteader section.  70 years old and worried about our energy resource future.  Felling and working with larger trees becomes difficult at this age.  We have been letting both the alders and willows grow for the last 5 years and they are getting to the point where some are large enough to use for firewood.  There is a story in the town where I live (Washington county, Maine) of a family that harvested these two types of wood as their only source of firewood.  They had a little over 5 acres.  We currently burn around 2-3 full cords of hardwood, and around 1/2 cord of soft slab wood.  We have 3 gas stihl chainsaws of different sizes, but we are going to switch over to a battery operated chainsaw and a Bahco bow saw.

I coppice lots of willows and have started doing it with the hazelnuts. Some willows and poplars get pollarded, like the ones in the fruit orchard where I have this plan to stretch a network of wire and put bird netting over all the trees at once. I also pollard most of the Tasmanian blackwoods that pop up semi-randomly from root suckers, with the plan to eventually harvest the trunks for timber and firewood. And last winter I decapitated three redwoods but left a few horizontal branches on each with the idea of training them daisugi style.

Pollarding is my primary goat fodder strategy.

So far it's been a very effective means of getting lots of privet, maple, elm, and mulberry in harvestable range. Also using it to keep my chestnuts from getting too huge.

Last vote in apple poll was on November 16, 2025