Logs, racks and ropes

We've got my Dad here now, and three pairs of hands make things go faster... You can't miss my Dad in the woods, due to his coat:
Still, it gives me something bright to aim at when felling trees. (joking!)

In the morning we did a bit of general clearing up, Tracy organising various piles of Hazel that had been felled earlier
while Dad and I split and stacked some sycamore logs that had been felled a few weeks ago
I'd not split them earlier as we were racing ahead trying to fell trees as fast as possible, but we've now got the claim year for the conservation grant we have for this bit of work pushed back from 2010 to 2011, allowing us to take more time and get the job done properly.

We got onto felling trees later on, taking down several chestnut stems and converting a number of them directly into stakes to use to build some racks, ready to receive the rest of the logs for storage. Here's a rack for 2m split firewood logs (to be cross-cut in a year's time), with a rack for longer logs behind it, some of them 9'6" in case we fancy making rails for post and rail fencing at some point.
We roped all the trees, as it was pretty windy today. I've remade the end of my rope pole with some stronger metal and it's working nicely now:
We had a nice roaring fire going all day, to burn up the tops of the chestnut, which we aren't keeping. Hopefully it'll still be lit tomorrow morning...
The final job, as dusk approached, was building another rack to store sycamore to season, ready for cross-cutting next autumn:
I expect we'll do a bit more splitting of some the big logs you can see to fill it up tomorrow.

Mike