Autumn has arrived in the woods

There's been a definite change in the woods this week, with the leaves changing colour and falling, letting more light in:

It's very different to a few months ago, and soon we'll probably be looking forward to spring... Hopefully we'll have a a bit of snow first though!

As we were walking over to our coppicing site, we spotted boar prints in the track, which is strange, as normally they follow their own tracks in the wood. It seems to be really hard to take a picture that shows their prints properly, I guess it'd need to be in 3D! Anyway, here's my best attempt, which just about shows the little toe print at the side of the foot towards the back:

The other large mammal in the wood was a horse, leaning in over the fence to get at the dead hedge we'd built from Hornbeam brash:

It wasn't afraid to dig in to find those last few leaves!

Here's the progress so far. After the two full log racks are two new ones we're filling. We think that once they're filled that might be a year's worth of home heating, leaving the surplus to sell or put to other uses.

After this winter we'll have a much better idea of exactly how much wood we need to get us through a year, and then we can cut the right amount of coppice for our own needs and a bit more for friends we supply.

Mike

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Pollarding Hornbeam, and smoky sunbeams

We've made a lot of progress in the last few days, and we think we're about a third of the way through what we need to complete this winter, which is good, considering we're still in October. Some of the trees have been pretty chunky, like the Ash below, which means our racks of logs are filling up fast.

We've done some more work on the Hornbeam pollards at the edge of the wood as well. We've got permission to fell stems into the adjacent field when necessary, providing we take account of the horses that are in there at the moment. There's some hefty stems to fell, like this pair which I brought down together:

Hornbeam is extremely dense, so the logs from these stems weigh a lot! But they'll be useful for fuelling our stove in two years' time. It's hard to split though, but fortunately I've got a way of doing this. I chucked the logs back over the fence, and we used the brash to build up a bit of a dead hedge:

However, the horses have decided they like Hornbeam leaves, so I think the top of the "hedge" will get eaten!

Here's a couple of arty pictures I took, of sunbeams coming through the smoke from our brash fire:

I also couldn't resist getting some close-up pictures of a spider that was on top of one of the stakes we'd used to make the log racks:

And yes, I did encourage the spider to stay on the top until I had some good pictures! I moved it to a safe place afterwards though...

Here's the current view from our reference photo point, followed by the same view before we started:

We're definitely making progress!

Finally, here's what happened to some of the Ash that we felled last year and passed on to a friend who's an expert woodworker:

Nice eh?

Mike

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Sussex and Surrey Coppice Group

We've been members of the Sussex and Surrey Coppice Group for a while, but today was the first time we made it to one of their meetings.

There's two specific posts I've written already on tool repair and a mobile sawmill, the rest of the event follow below.

The event was held in a woodland about an hour from us, and many members were demonstrating their crafts.
More follows in the rest of the post, including a charcoal kiln and horse team...

The various demonstrations going on included making a mini coracle:
Charcoal burning (I found out quite a lot about this from several people there, as it's something I'd like to try):
and a horse team, moving logs for the mobile sawmill to process. The horses were very well trained, walking backwards, forwards and stopping on verbal commands.
There were numerous other things going on, such as basket weaving (with Alan Sage), chair making and more. One of the events was an auction of tools and various bits of woodland equipment:
I was pleased to come away with two billhooks, one of them an Elwell. Plenty of spare now for when visitors are in the wood!

Mike

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