Frosty days and splitting wood the Norwegian way

It's been frosty in the wood recently! This created an opportunity for a photos... There's a few below, and you can view more here.

I've changed the way I split logs now - I used to start the split with a maul (a heavy axe), and then use a sledgehammer and wedges to finish it off. But after reading Norwegian Wood a year ago, I tried a new method that requires only the maul. Rather than describe it, I'll leave you to watch a 1 minute video:

With the cold the Robins are becoming much bolder - we're working across the territories of two or three of them this winter.

Though the really lucky one has the log I sit on at lunchtime in its territory, and I always leave some crumbs....

I found some evidence of another bird, and only because I walked a short distance to coppice this wind-blown stool so I could get lots of straight sections to use for making stakes:

On top of the coppice stool were these owl pellets:

I picked some open and you can see the fragments of bone mixed in with the fur. Shame they don't eat squirrels really...

Oh, and I did get a nice pile of stakes from the wood I cut!

The coppicing is proceeding well, we've got several stacks of wood seasoning now, for use in a couple of years' time:

At the other end of the area we're cutting there's not actually that much left to do, so it will probably be done by the end of the year, if there's enough good weather coinciding with days off work.

Mike

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Autumn leaves, buzzards overhead and some Christmas gifts from the woods

Autumn is shifting towards winter in the woods, but there's some lovely sights right now, such as this carpet of leaves:

The regrowth in the area we cut a year ago is still hanging on to a few leaves:

But most of the trees are bare, and the sun is low in the sky:

Just as I was finishing my lunch during a day of coppicing, I heard the familiar call of a Buzzard overhead. As pigeons scattered in terror, I grabbed the camera and managed to snap a few long-distance photos of them. One day I'd like to have my own hawk flying in the woods...

It was back to work after that though - things are progressing pretty well, we're well past the oak tree you can see towards the rear of this picture:

Meanwhile, we've also been preparing some produce for the Rye Christmas Market.Quite a bit went into making these. They've been collected in the woodland, dried for over a year, stripped of soft dead wood, wire brushed and finally shaped so they are stable and have a place to take a tea-light candle.

That's all for now...

Mike

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A Hornets' Nest, False Death Cap and coppicing update

It's been a few weeks since I last posted, so there's quite a bit to say... First, here's a short video of a nest of European Hornets in our woodland. They're actually quite timid, and didn't bother me at all while I was making the video. I hear Asian Hornets are a different matter all together...

Also of interest is this mushroom - the False Death Cap (Amanita citrina), so named because of its similarity to the lethal Death Cap. It is allegedly edible, but given the risk of confusion with a killer, I don't think anyone actually eats it.

I was working along the edge of the area we're cutting today, so got my rope and pulley set-up out for the first time in a few years, to avoid trees falling over the fence into the wayleave. They're not big enough trees to need the winch, so the rope and pulley is a nice quick solution - I learned how to do all this on the Coppice Harvesting Efficiency Course some years ago...

Here's a sequence of photos taken from the same viewpoint at the end of each visit to the woods over the past few weeks. Sometimes part of the work done was out of shot, so not much change is visible, but I think you'll see we've made some progress...

That's all for now...

Mike

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The start of this year's coppicing

We made a start on this year's coppicing! The first job was to cut back the side of the track passing through the wayleave, so we can get the car in:

This is the area we're cutting, starting at the corner where the footpath meets the wayleave, and running alongside the wayleave in a strip:

Here's the same shot after the first day's work, which was mainly spent clearing back small stuff at the edge of the footpath and building a couple of racks to store the cut wood in:

I did manage to make a small start filling them though, one of Birch:

and one of Sweet Chestnut:

There's a bit more light getting in already!

One interesting thing I found was an old tree stump which we'd left when coppicing the footpath edge here 8 years ago. It had become detached from the roots, so I'm taking it home to clean up as it looks nice:

Back for more progress on the coppicing soon...

Mike

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Digging a new culvert

Not content with repairing an old culvert, we've also been busy digging a new one. Here's the track before we started, with the pipe laid on top:

The water comes from a spring up the hill from the track:

The first step was to dig a trench for the pipe:

This time, as we didn't have any convenient lumps of concrete, we've driven several chestnut stakes into the ground either side of the pipe where the car wheels will cross it, to provide some extra support:

Having covered the pipe back over, we dug a sump on the uphill side:

And an outflow on the downhill side:

Here it is immediately after completion and being driven over once:

Just a couple of weeks later, the track is transformed!

We also put in some big logs on either side to act as 'kerbs' to retain the soil:

One other interesting point - I noticed a lot of wasps while I was working on this, and found they were heading into this hole:

Which on closer examination had a nest in it!

I'll be starting coppicing in a few weeks, and hope to have a bit more time to update the blog after that...

Mike

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