It was raining today :-(
Tracy had some stuff to get done in Rye, so I went up to the wood on my own. I'm not entirely comfortable working alone felling trees alongside the public footpath, as it's good to have a second person as a lookout for walkers, so I did some odd jobs that had been waiting. Like sharpening one of the saw chains that had got blunt last Friday. We rotate a group of three chains on each saw, so when one gets blunt you can just swap to another, as long as you remember to come back and sharpen it when you have time! It also has the advantage of wearing out all the chains at the same time that the drive sprocket needs changing, then you can start again with a new set and sprocket.
Anyway, the other thing that needing doing was gathering together the bits of birch that were left in various places around the area we cut last winter and converting them to firewood. Not especially exciting, but quite satisfying work to do.
I've stacked the logs under the drying shelter for now to keep the rain off them.
Fortunately the sun came out later, and I got some pictures of what's going on in the wood.
It's looking kind of desolate now the leaves have gone.
and the oaks are looking positively skeletal:
I noticed something interesting out on the wayleave. On a small oak tree were some "oak apples", which are formed by gall wasps. Earlier in the year these were shades of green, but now they've turned brown and you can see a hole where the wasp dug its way out:
I cut one open, revealing the hollow centre where the insect developed:
That's all for now, we're back in the wood on Thursday...
Mike
Monday, 24 November 2008
Odds and ends
Tuesday, 26 August 2008
Bank holiday weekend - Monday
On Monday we had to be at the wood to meet a customer, who was collecting chestnut poles or making garden furniture. We went up a bit early and Tracy tidied and sorted some of the poles while I split the birch we'd sawn on Saturday, stacking it in the drying shelter:
I've worked out that once the second part of the shelter is full, we'll have almost 2 cubic meters of firewood in there!
After our customer had visited, I took a few pictures of the things that are growing. We're certainly going to have no problem with regeneration in the wood. Here's a birch, of which there are hundreds around. Many will be eaten though, so not all will grow up into trees
Here's a chestnut. There aren't as many of these self-seeded, but they don't seem to get eaten as much, so I think more will grow up to full size trees.
Here's an oak. These are the ones we're trying to watch, as they seem to struggle when they're small, getting eaten and shaded out. We tried small plastic tree shelters, but they didn't seem to work so well, so we're looking for another approach...
While we're on the subject of oak, we've found a number of acorns on the ground that have had gall wasp eggs laid in them. This one's a Knopper Gall. Apparently the insect requires both Pendunculate and Turkey oaks to complete its lifecycle.
There's also lots of new wild flowers coming up in the cant we cut last winter. These were not in evidence last year, so seem to be a direct effect of the work we did. We're not great on flower ID, but we think this is a Black Nightshade (which is poisonous):
and we think this is a Common Calamint. UPDATE - it's not, it's a Lesser Skullcap, which is somewhat rare.
There's also a lot of this, but we have no idea what it is. Hopefully it will flower and then we'll have a chance to ID it.
Mike
