Spider webs, a broken chain and a coppicing milestone

Last week I reached a milestone! I've now cut enough wood for winter 2015/16! I'll still cut some more, so there's a bit spare in case of hard winters or friends wanting to buy an occasional load in a couple of years' time, but it's good to know the minimum is now done.

But perhaps more interesting is how the spider webs look now that there's dew in the mornings!

These trees were full of them! Now I see why there are so many running around after I've felled a tree - I guess they are all suddenly looking for a new home...

I had a little mishap as well - a chainsaw chain snapped, the first time I've seen this happen. It wasn't dangerous - there's a couple of bits on the saw to deal with this happening and I use a short bar when coppicing so there's not much chain anyway. It just made a metallic noise and ended up on the floor in front of me...

Anyway, here's a couple of views of the area I've been coppicing:

And here's our 2015/16 home heating:

Mike

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Summer camping in the woods

Well, the British Summer has been wetter than usual, but this week we managed to get a couple of days off to coincide with some sunshine, and went to camp in the woods for a night...

This was the first time we'd both been camping there since I got a new phone, so we took advantage of it to set up a solar-powered woodland wifi hotspot, so Tracy could use her ipod and keep up to date on facebook!

We had a great dinner, cooked mostly on the BBQ:

Using our own charcoal of course

Here's the end result, including sweetcorn, chicken kebabs and halloumi cheese!

Of course, for taking photos of food I should really be using a new iPhone 5... :-)

After dinner we settled down around the fire for the evening...

As usual on a first night sleeping in the woods, we woke up early. As it was sunny, I wandered around getting some photos of the sun coming up...

Later in the morning we went to watch the wildlife. There were several flocks of a variety of small birds moving through the wood, though it's hard to get photos of them at this time of year, due to the leaves on the trees. I managed to catch this Robin briefly:

and then got several of a Treecreeper preening:

I also got these pictures, which at first I had thought were of the treecreeper too, but on closer examination I think they might be something else, though I'm not sure what...

Lots of insects around too, like this Red Admiral butterfly:

A Small White:

A Silver Y moth (thanks to Heather for the ID)

Loads of dragonflies:

and lots of bumble bees too:

When we were packing up the tent, we also rescued this cricket(?) from getting squashed:

and I found this weird insect, which looks like a bit of algae off a tree, trying to eat me:

And finally, insects are of course food for spiders...

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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