We inherited a failing pine plantation. This is how we turned it around

When we bought this place back in 2003, we inherited a small plantation of Sitka pines. They were planted in the 1970s, when the French government was handing out grants to encourage people to put in cash crop trees. The logic was simple: plant them young, let them grow for a few decades, sell the timber, and use the money to top up a pension.

What nobody planned for was the drought. Over the years we have watched these trees struggle badly. The dry summers have hit them hard, and a weakened tree is exactly what the spruce bark beetle is looking for. It gets in behind the bark and eats the cambium layer, and once it takes hold, the tree is on borrowed time. One by one, our pines have been dying back.

The storms have not helped either. Winters seem to bring bigger winds than they used to, and a dying pine in a storm is a very different thing from a healthy one. Glen has been working through the plantation gradually, taking down the trees that are genuinely dangerous and leaving the ones that are still stable standing until he actually needs them. It is a slow, considered process rather than a panic response.

People ask us all the time why we leave the dead trees standing rather than dropping them straight away. Glen’s answer is pretty simple: a dead tree takes up a lot less space upright than it does on the ground. Once it falls, you have to cut it up, move it, stack it, and deal with it, and it starts rotting much faster once it is in contact with the damp soil. Leaving a stable dead tree standing until the moment you need it is just more practical. And while it stands, it is still doing something useful, providing habitat for insects and birds, which matters to us.

When a tree does come down, we make sure nothing gets wasted. Every branch gets chipped. That chip goes straight onto the pathways around the property. It keeps the mud down in wet weather, makes the site much easier to work in, and over time it breaks down completely into rich, dark soil. A branch becomes a path becomes fertility. That kind of loop is at the heart of how we try to run this place.

Not every trunk is suitable for milling into planks. The trees that have been heavily infected by the bark beetle are not worth putting through the sawmill, as the wood is too compromised. But they are far from useless. That wood goes straight into our home heating system and our log burning hot tub. It burns well and heats the house and the water, so even the most damaged trees end up contributing something. The wood we do mill into planks comes from trees where the timber is still in good condition. It is sound, clean wood that can be turned into something lasting.

Clear-felling was never really something we considered. It would have left the ground in a terrible state, and the money from selling the timber commercially would have been a fraction of what we get by using it ourselves. Wood prices have gone through the roof since Covid and they have not come back down. Every plank, fence post, and beam we mill ourselves is money we are not spending.

We started out with a Logosol Farmers sawmill, which was a decent enough starting point. It was quiet, affordable, and Glen could use it to cut planks from the logs. But it ran off a chainsaw, which meant it was slow and there was a fair amount of wastage. Over time we decided to upgrade, sold the Logosol, and invested in a Norwood NM26 bandsaw mill in 2020. It can cut planks up to 6.5 metres long and it has completely changed what is possible here.

We have not bought in timber for any project on the property since. We have even started milling wood for friends and neighbours on small projects locally.

Once you have your own mill, the property starts changing shape. Buildings appear that would never have been worth commissioning. Shelters, kitchens, animal housing. Each one a small piece of permanent value that came out of a tree we would otherwise have lost.

It is one of those things that sounds complicated but is really just common sense. The trees are dying anyway. The wood has value. We have the tools to use it. So we do.

This whole system, the selective felling, the chipping, the milling, the pathways turning to soil, the infected wood heating the house, is a real-life example of the permaculture principles we will be exploring during our PDC course at Afrinoon this summer, running from the 23rd of July to the 7th of August. We will not just be talking about these ideas in theory. We will be walking you around the land and showing you exactly how they work in practice.