More coppicing...

Just a general update on progress over the last couple of days...

We've been felling the trees on the border with our neighbour's yard. Most of these need roping to pull them back into the wood, and some are pretty awkward. We treated this tangled bunch of five stems as a unit, roping them all together and putting felling cuts into all of them:
With them out of the way the gap has opened up, and our neighbour's geese seemed to enjoy the sunlight - they're round a pond behind the fence you can see.
On the other side is a Cherry tree which we're mostly leaving as it is, because some of it is an excellent dead-wood habitat. However, there was one branch which would create too much shade over the coppice, so it came down:
Meanwhile Tracy was busy battling with Hazel, some of it really tangled, like this stool which has mixed itself up with a Holly:
Our reliable old brash fire had been burning for 15 days continuously, but it was time to move it. Fortunately this is pretty easy - you just collect up the embers in a shovel, move them to a new site and add dry wood:
A neighbour of ours who's done some coppicing in the wood behind their house turned up yesterday with the vehicle they're using to extract the produce to the wayleave, and I couldn't resist having a quick look at it:
It's pretty neat, and he added the box on the front himself - it has an extending rack to help it carry timber. While down in the wayleave I snapped a picture of this Brown Roll-rim:
The fungi have really gone crazy in the past week, after the dry summer we had down here followed by the recent rain.

The last job up at the work site was to convert some of the chestnut we felled last week into benches. These will come in handy while we're working there, especially when there's visitors, and we plan to leave them there for walkers to enjoy the view as the coppice re-grows next summer. All you need to do is use the chainsaw to plane off one side of a log:
then turn it over and cut some wide notches:
then the top sits on a couple of shorter logs:
It does look a bit lop-sided, but that's the uneven ground I think.

We're meant to be in the woods for the next few days, but the weather's not looking great so we might be finding some jobs that need doing at home. We'll have to wait and see what it's like in the morning...

Mike