Firewood and beetles

I had numerous jobs to get done yesterday, including visiting a firewood customer to see if we can get the car and trailer into their property. In the afternoon I went up to the wood to split some firewood, while Tracy was teaching. I found a strange thing on top of a pile of offcuts when I got there:
It's a pile of dead beetles:
I can only imagine a bird had been eating them there. Any other ideas?

Anyway, I got on with the splitting. Last year we left the offcuts until later, and they got very hard to split, so this year I'm doing them as we go along:
I split up some more birch too:
However, we have a new plan for how to process the firewood quickly, that we learned from Tim Saunders (the guy who did our oak thinning for us) of Rother Forestry. He was teaching a training course on Coppice Products that Tracy had organised. It's a bit difficult to explain the firewood plan without some pictures, so when we try it I'll write about it.

Tim also showed us how to split chestnut for post&rail fenching:
We're at the wood again on Friday to do various bits of work, including some more firewood processing and delivery.

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Assorted woodland photos

There's a few odds and ends collected over the weekend, and also yesterday evening, when we popped up to the wood for a walk around at sunset.

A birch trying to grow as fast as it can after we pollarded it a couple of months ago:

more follows, including oak apples, a rabbit, a beetle and where some of our woodland produce has gone...

and a coppiced chestnut doing the same:
An "oak apple" we found lying on the ground under one of the oaks. These aren't apples at all, but are a mutation of the the oak leaf cause by chemicals injected by the larvae of a gall wasp, according to Wikipedia. The wasp matures inside the "apple", and apparently is good fishing bait and even survival food!
A rabbit and a beetle on the wayleave:
sunset through the trees:
a gibbous moon:
and the track between Sweep Wood and Grist Wood looking rather dark!
and finally, some of our produce in use. First, bean poles at a neighbouring allotment patch:
and a trailer load of oak sawdust, which has gone to a friend who plans to build something to smoke the game he shoots.
Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.