Extracting firewood

We've finished the work levelling the tracks (or rides, if you want the forestry term) in the wood, and now we can start moving out the wood we cut last winter:


With logs sticking out the back, we have about two cubic metres of space in the land rover, though some of that is air between the logs, so we're probably looking at 7-800kg of wood in the back of it!

We've been able to drive right the way to the top of the hill, where we were coppicing last winter:


From there it's pretty easy to get down the hill back into the woods...

and onto the section we've levelled out along the edge of Sweep Wood:

and from there back into Chestnut Coppice:

We're also able to drive up the hill between Sweep Wood and Chestnut Coppice now, which we'd never tried before:

We intend to only drive on the tracks when they're dry, so that they don't get rutted. This should work OK, as we can fell in the winter and stack the wood near where it falls, then extract it the following summer.

There's some changes in the wood at this time of year, such as fungi coming up:


Cob nuts growing on the trees we planted in November:

and our first chestnuts on the trees we coppiced in 2007/8:

It was pretty windy today, and bizarrely an Ash tree fell over in Sweep Wood in between two trips past it moving logs:

It was one that had bracket fungi growing from the base, so I suspect that had weakened it. It'll be interesting to see if it recovers - if not, there are plenty of other Ash trees in that part.

Mike