Local Straw Harvesting & Coppicing
For many years now the local production of thatching materials has been in decline throughout most of the UK. This coupled with successive poor weather at straw harvest has led to volatile prices and great inconsistencies in quality.
This has led to huge amounts of thatching materials being imported. Water reed from as far away as China, and hazel spars made in Eastern Europe have undermined local industry and threaten to further erode the diverse regional nature of thatching in our country, not to mention the green credentials of straw roofs.
Rumpelstiltskin Thatching Company have taken a stand and have been developing their own in house material production, and now make both long straw and hazel spars within a few miles of the roofs for which they are destined.
STRAW HARVESTING
Modern wheat varieties have been bred to be very short with huge yields of grain, but these are of no use to the thatcher. Their straw must be from older varieties, with long stems.
Rumpelstiltskin, working with Michael Marriage of Doves Organic Farm www.dovesfarm.co.uk (pictured left), produced and harvested 10 acres of Spelt last summer. This is an ancient ancestor of modern wheat and makes fine long straw.
Rumpelstiltskin would like to express their gratitude for Michael’s great patience and generous spirit in this first venture.
The straw must be cut and bound into sheaves whilst slightly green to retain the maximum strength and durability in the finished material. It is then stood up or ‘stooked’ to ripen in the field before being stacked ready for threshing later in the year.
This is a very labour intensive process, with each sheaf of straw being handled around ten times before it gets to the roof.
Rumpelstiltskin invested in the best machinery for the job, but the reaper binder and threshing machine have a combined age of some 140 years. This may make for a beautiful and evocative country scene, but is perhaps indicative of the lack of investment the craft has received in the previous century. It seems that a craft so important to our cultural heritage may need to look to contempory farm machinery manufacturers for help to ensure its future and take it’s place in the fast growing movement towards sustainable building materials.
HAZEL COPPICING
The thatching industry is a huge consumer of coppiced hazel, as every traditional straw thatch is fixed to the roof with nothing more than twisted hazel spars.
The remaining woodland in our countryside contains relatively large areas of hazel coppice, but unfortunately most of this is very overgrown and needs to be restored. Good quality hazel for thatching spars and ligers needs to be coppiced on an eight year cycle to produce straight rods of the appropriate thickness.
Rumpelstiltskin have been working with the conservator of Wytham Woods, Nigel Fisher to restore a significant area of hazel coppice. There may be little reward for all the effort now, but it will pay its own way in just eight years.
Wytham Woods is owned and run by Oxford University as a centre for research and hosts studies into climate change, habitat renewal, and boasts the longest running Great Tit study in the world. It has also been certified by the FSC as sustainable woodland.
To make the work a little easier, Pierre, who joined the company in 2008, has been sent off on a chain saw course.
You can read Pierres story from within the News & Events section
Matt and Dave were taught how to split hazel during their NVQ Thatching course at Knuston Hall in Northamptonshire, but with perseverance, it is a skill that all the team are getting to grips with.
Buying locally produced thatching materials provides employment in rural areas, helping the local economy as well as reducing the environmental impact of transport and providing improved habitat for wildlife.