I'm feeling a little smug today as I planted 25 chestnut trees (Castania sativa - or sweet chestnut) yesterday.
I've been coppicing around our boundary for four years and this has provided us with most of the firewood for our stove over the winter. In the long run a coppicing cycle like this should be carbon neutral but in the short run it isn't. What I have been coppicing are the fruits of forty years of neglect - a forty-year store of sequestered carbon. If I simply carry on coppicing the existing stock of trees (or rather overgrown hedge) on, say, a ten year cycle, there will still have been a one-off de-sequestration of carbon.
One way to sequester more carbon is to plant more trees. What I have planted will form a proper coppice - much easier to manage than a hedge line of brambles and blackthorn. With luck we may get some chestnuts as well.
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