Sunday 17 January 2016

Coppicing finished for this winter

The coppicing is now finished for this winter. Here's how it looked from one end back in October:

DSC_4262

The same view now is:
DSC_4623

It's a good feeling to have all that wood stacked up and seasoning:
DSC_4624

Here's a few more views of the finished work:
DSC_4622

DSC_4620

DSC_4614

What's a bit odd is that Bluebell shoots have been showing for a couple of weeks now:
DSC_4616

Presumably this is due to the mild December, hopefully they won't be too badly affected now that the weather has turned more normal for winter. Looking back at past photos, it seems the shoots are about 4 weeks ahead of normal.

Still, I expect the birds have benefited from the mild weather, I saw this Nuthatch discovering food on a dead oak tree recently:
DSC_4611

The tame pheasants are of course spoilt by easy access to seed falling from our bird feeder - here's the male, strutting around a few days ago:
DSC_4634

Once the tame female realised there was food on offer, she sprinted over to join him:
DSC_4653

DSC_4647

Looking forward to Spring now! :-)

Mike

4 comments:

Grayhen Tor said...

Nice work.. you HAVE been busy! Yep, bluebells charging ahead up here too...

Justin said...

That looks like a great result on the coppicing. I have a question for you if I may, as I'm a novice coppice worker on our own little piece of woodland. Your stacks of long wood that you're seasoning, I see some have been split lengthways but some are left in the round. Do you find that it dries ok in the round with the bark on? I split some of our larger logs like that but the smaller stuff doesn't work so well and I've considered taking strips of bark off to speed up the drying instead.

Mike Pepler said...

Hi Justin. Wood that isn't split won't dry very well, especially if it is Birch. The solution is to 'stripe' the wood, by skimming the chainsaw along the side to remove some bark. If you do this during the snedding/measuring/logging immediately after felling the tree it doesn't take much time. I tend to do one strip for wood up to 2" diameter, 2 strips up to 4", and three stripes above that, until they get thick enough to split.

Cheers, Mike

Justin said...

Thanks Mike, that makes sense, I'll work on doing that to help things dry out faster.