Coppicing update

There's been a few days with nice weather during December so far, and it's been great to spend them cutting trees in the woods:

I've had several pheasants coming to watch me work - they aren't sufficiently afraid of humans for their own good! Fortunately for them I wasn't out to shoot them.

The trees I've been felling have been yielding a decent quantity of wood, so I've had to build several more racks to store it in, but the tricky bit is always find a place for them where they won't be in the way of trees I'm yet to fell. In this case, I felled several trees first and cut them up:

Then built a rack where they'd fallen, using some of the logs from them as bearers:

Then the remainder of the logs made a good start towards filling the rack!

Of course, plans and the wind direction sometimes change as you go along, and this tree didn't have a clear space to fall into. But it was very satisfying to get it to fall just where I wanted it, missing this log rack on the right and some regrowing trees on the left:

As well as the racks of firewood, there's also a nice pile of logs which will make good benches at some point in future:

And also lots of blanks for making one-piece stools:

It looks like there'll be a few more sunny days over the holidays, so I'm looking forward to spending some more time up there - I shouldn't need many more days to complete the work I've planned for this winter.

Mike