Unlike oak which takes two years to season willow logs can be ready to burn in three months. However the latter view is completely wrong. Willow wood is on average 55% moisture content when harvested. “Wet wood that takes ages to season” – The first half of this statement is correct.I have lost count of the number of people who say that they wouldn’t waste their time with this fuel. Yet, willow comes in for all sorts of criticism. Most of our biomass varieties are excellent coppicing but there are some that can be encouraged to grow as a single stem from a 2 metre sett. You can produce log scale willow in just 4 years. Let’s look at the pros first – easy to grow, cheap planting stock, very fast growing, excellent yield and good form. The Usain Bolt of trees – willow is the quickest tree out of the blocks! Incredible high yield biomass growth in just 4 years. Here’s my alternative guide to the grow your own firewood runners and riders (well the ones we sell anyway!): So if you have a bit of land and want firewood quickly then you would be foolish to overlook short rotation trees. Everyone and their dog has a log stove these days, there are 20,000 plus biomass boilers in the UK and lots of power stations all competing for cheap sources of wood. If you continue to buy in logs, you will almost certainly be aware of the rise in prices in recent months and years. With the former, you need to ask yourself whether you have 20 years to wait for oak, ash or hornbeam to grow and produce decent logs? They are fantastic trees but they have dense wood for a reason – because they are slow growing. Either of these options has real downsides. If you believe what you read you are going to be put right off and either decide to plant some hardwoods or continue to buy from your local log merchant. In particular, willow, poplar and eucalyptus come way down the league table of desirable woodfuels – described as too wet, too fast burning, putrid smell, tough to split etc. However, there is also a great deal of received wisdom and some spurious misinformation about the lack of virtue of some woods. I’m no conspiracy theorist – overall I agree with a lot of the information. So often in fact, that it now believed to be undeniably true. A long, long time ago someone spent some effort developing this directory and it’s been repeated and plagiarised without mercy. If you do a search online for the best trees for logs you’ll find the same list reproduced again and again.
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