Yesterday (Saturday) we went out for the day to visit Ben Law's place - Prickly Nut Wood, over in West Sussex. You can read more about him on his website: http://www.ben-law.co.uk/
He was having an open day for the Small Woods Association, and although it was an 80 mile drive for us, it was well worth it as we learned a lot - his wood is similar to ours in some ways, and he's been managing it for many years. It would take me too long to write a detailed article, so I'll simply put in the pictures from the day with some explanation...
The visit started with a 3-hour tour of Ben's woods, with lots of explanations and many chances to ask questions on management, wildlife and anything else.
The woods were beautiful:
One thing I noticed immediately was that the stocking rate was well above what it is in our wood:
On asking Ben about this, he thought the reduced number of chestnut stools was probably due to our oak standards not being managed for many decades - they should have been periodically felled and new ones planted. At least we've made a step in the right direction by thinning some of the oaks. Ben's advice was for us to use layering (see last section on this page) in winter 2009/10 to increase the stocking rate.
One other thing I'd like to encourage is some chestnut standards for nut production. I was amazed to see the size of some of the chestnuts in Ben's wood:
We have some larger stools that are healthy, so perhaps we can single some of them, allowing the best stem to grow into a mature tree.
Unlike our wood, Ben's is partly on a hillside, which makes extraction harder, though at least the entrance is at the bottom of the hill.
Here's a ~2 acre coupe Ben cut last winter, looking similar to our area, just a lot bigger!
And here's an area that was cut the winter before - so this is what our cut area should look like in a year's time! Apparently this is where nightjars like to nest, so it's good to always have a patch that's around this height.
Ben also showed us some areas where the coppice has been neglected. As you can see, the trees self-single and grow large, with little of the ground-level plants that so many species of wildlife need to live in.
Ben was asked why he's not cut this section yet - the answer was that he doesn't cut a tree until he knows who he's going to sell the produce too. Once the right buyer or market is ready, he'll cut this section and bring it back into cycle for timber production and biodiversity.
One of the keys to bringing coppice back into management is having a market for the wood, unless you have the spare cash to just get the work done without selling anything! Charcoal burning is one way of turning otherwise low-value wood into a high-value product, although the demand for charcoal depends on how the summer weather turns out... Here's a large kiln waiting to be emptied:
Back at his base, we had lunch in his outdoors kitchen:
We al admired Ben's house, which he managed to get planning permission for after 10 years of living in caravans and under canvas. It's largely built from materials from his own wood, with strawbale and lime walls for good insulation. It's heated by wood stoves (naturally), with solar water heating, mini wind turbines and solar PV panels for electricity, using a large battery bank to store power for use overnight. Water comes from a spring, and composting toilets are used. So the house is totally off-grid, for both energy and water. He does have a backup diesel generator that sometimes gets used in the winter though.
Next to the house is the workshop:
This is where Ben actually makes a living - turning the trees he's felled into useful products.
A highlight for me was the demonstration of a "logging arch". The pictures speak for themselves, I want one now!
I think I would also like some big cant hooks like these. Not sure about a sawmill though - perhaps hiring one for a day is a better option for now...
Another handy tool was a debarker:
Ben doesn't only produce wood though, he also grows food. We saw a stack of logs impregnated with spores for mushroom production, and also several small orchards, such as this one nestled amongst the chestnut:
That's all for now. It's been raining all afternoon, but is drying up now, so we might do an evening trip to the wood to consider our plans in the light of what we learnt yesterday...
Mike
Sunday, 6 July 2008
A visit to Ben Law's wood
Friday, 4 July 2008
Butterflies!
I was up in the wood to do some work on Thursday (see earlier post), and saw more butterflies than I ever had before in one day there!
The area I was working was where we'd seen the White Admiral last weekend, and as I was in the at spot for several hours, I saw a lot more of them. At one point there were three at once, chasing each other around! It's exciting to see that we've created a habitat for them - they were not to be seen in our wood at this time last year - especially as they are a priority species on the Biodiversity Action Plan. I got some better pictures of several of them:
However, the first butterfly I saw in the wood was before I'd even dumped the stuff I was carrying. It was fluttering around a clearing we'd made felling birch on the ride edge almost a year ago:
Here it is: the Speckled Wood:
While I was working, there was a small orange and brown butterfly zipping around, but never stopping for me to get a photo. However, while on a break I wandered over to our entrance, and caught one on the ground - it's a Meadow Brown
Nearby was another as yet unidentified butterfly:
I also saw (but did not get to photograph) a Brimstone, what was probably an Orange Tip and something small and blue!
Of course, there were other insects around too, such as these dragonflies:
The very first blackberries are now beginning to ripen:
and something strange has happened to our pond - the green foam has gone:
This happened to the smaller downstream pond too, so maybe it's just a stage they go through? There are still plants growing in it, so we will wait and see what happens...
Mike
Clearing windblown trees
I had Thursday off work this week, so while Tracy was busy in meetings about training people in woodland management, I was in our wood doing some of it! There are a number of chestnut stools in our wood that have blown over in the past, before we bought the wood, and I spent today clearing some of them up.
But first, some pictures of an interesting piece of machinery that our contractor had left at the wood:
Basically, it can cross-cut a log, split it, and load it into a trailer or truck!
You can see the teeth on the circular saw for crosscutting here:
and here's the splitter in the foreground:
stored behind the splitter is the driveshaft, which in operation would link a tractor coupling to this point:
Anyway, back to the work I was doing. There are several reasons to take down windblown coppice stools:
There is a potential downside in that a dead tree is a useful wildlife habitat, but this is less of an issue for chestnut, which is durable and rots very slowly, so is not much help to wildlife anyway.
No felling license is required for windblown trees, and as the majority of the ones I dealt with were already dead, there was no downside to cutting them in the summer either. A few stems were alive, but in such as state that I thought it best to deal with them right away and give them a chance to get a bit of new growth in before the summer is gone. I was focusing on the areas where we expect to coppice later this year, to save us time in the winter.
Here's a typical windblown stool, where all the stems were long dead:
After clearing all the stems, I found that the stool itself was completely uprooted - we'll have to think about what creative use we can put it to...
Here's another dead one after cutting the stems - very satisfying work to do!
This one was a bit more tricky, as I wanted to preserve the honeysuckle (I only get rid of it where it's interfering with regrowth on coppiced stools):
It worked out OK, I was able to avoid cutting the honeysuckle and trail it over another nearby tree:
At the end of all this I had quite a pile of logs, all thoroughly dry as the trees had been dead for several years:
I'll be saving some this to convert to charcoal, as it should be ideal for that, and the rest will make great camp fires when needed.
While doing all this work, I saw the most butterflies ever in a single day at the wood. See the post on them here. I also saw a small lizard, but didn't have my camera with me.
Mike
Wednesday, 2 July 2008
White Admiral butterfly
OK, I know these are not great pictures, as Tracy had to take them while running after the butterfly, but we wanted to put them up for people to see.
We've had a huge number of butterflies and moths in the wood since we coppiced it, including Red Admiral, Peacock, Brimstone, Speckled Yellow, Holly Blue and more. This time though we thought we saw a White Admiral, which Steve Wheatley of Rother Butterfly Conservation has asked people to look out for. So, Tracy set off chasing it, and managed to get these pictures. It looks like it's a female of the species. If you can't see it in the second picture, it's perched on the stick near the centre.
It's also interesting to see exactly why the butterfly was where it was. Here's the area it was flying around:
It's on the perimeter of the area we coppiced, between the light and dark portions of the wood. Also in evidence was the honeysuckle where it lays its eggs:
Now I know honeysuckle is a pain when felling trees, as it tangles everything up, and we are making an effort to stop it smothering regrowth on the coppice stools and the small self-seeded oaks. However, we are leaving it where it grows on mature trees, as not only does it look nice, but it is also important for these butterflies and other creatures too.
Mike
Tuesday, 1 July 2008
Moving targets
We were up at the wood on Saturday, and I spent some time photographing flies, just to see what I could achieve with the new camera. I was pleased with the results:
Of course, there's plenty to attract flies and other wildlife these days, such as the honeysuckle and brambles in flower:
The coppice stools are still growing well, some are now a metre (3 feet) tall:
We also had a charcoal burn going - I like the heat haze you get over the kiln:
and our friends Justin and Emma came to visit, just to relax and whittle some sticks.
We had a customer too (J. Martin Rustic Garden Furniture), coming to buy chestnut poles for making garden furniture, taking away a nice truck load:
We had a job to do as well - a coppice stool had fallen over in Grist Wood, across the public footpath into our wood. As Roy and Patricia aren't up that often we offered to clear it up for them, and got to work:
We've left the stool tidied up, and the logs stacked in Grist Wood:
Mike
