Heartwood Podcast

Thinning may be the most controversial and poorly understood aspect of growing trees. Whether for conservation, timber or both, competition between trees may be slowing their growth and reducing the quality of your forest.  In this podcast Rowan explains how managing the 'personal space' around each tree can help create a more valuable forest.  He also touches on the risk of believing in...

We've spent 5 years building our new farmhouse. Almost all the timber (or lumber) came from trees we planted, pruned, harvested and milled on the farm. You could say it took us 38 years to grow our homegrown home! In this podcast I talk about growing and building the timber framing, boardroom concrete fireplace,  stairs, lining, cabinets and flooring using a range of species we've grown...

Can we change forestry to make it attractive to family farmers? In this episode Rowan Reid reflects on the history of forestry on farms in Australia and his involvement over the last 40 years. It's clear that forestry is not working for farmers and we need to change the way we talk about and support forestry in the family farming landscape. Key words: Forestry, Farm Forest, Forester, Trees, A...

My guest to talk about pruning trees for high quality timber is Josquin Tibbits; professional Arborist and Forest Scientist. Josky has been harvesting and milling pruned trees for his own building project. We discuss why, how, when and with what to prune young trees in order to confine branch knots to a central core and increase the proportion of high quality timber that can be recovered from the...

Andrew Stewart is a multi-award winning farmer in the Otways in southern Victoria, Australia. I'm a forest scientist with a small tree farm in the next valley. For more than 35 years we have shared a passion for making multipurpose tree growing attractive to family farmers in our region. With others, we set up the Otway Agroforestry Network in 1993; ran the first Australian Master TreeGrower...

David Jenkins grows eucalypt sawlogs and has a 10 inch Lucas Mill on his beef farm near Bridgetown in Western Australia. I have a Hardwood Mills GT40 Horizontal Bandsaw on our Bambra Agroforestry Farm in Victoria. We caught up in David's mill shed to discuss how these two Australian made mills perform and the advantages of each.  Keywords: Forestry, Farm Forest, Forester, Trees, Agroforestry,...