A quick update

We've been pretty busy recently, helping a friend move house and building a firewood shelter in our garden at home, so not a lot of time for photos and posting to the blog... I'll start writing about how we're building the firewood shelter shortly, but for now here's a few pictures from the woods, taken this weekend.

While collecting materials for the firewood shelter we got our Suzuki and a trailer all the way into Sweep Wood for the first time:

This included driving over the culvert, which worked just fine:

The area we recently coppiced in Sweep Wood is growing very rapidly, despite the dry weather:

There's another new plant there as well, Hogweed I think:

The old Hornbeam pollards at the edge are recovering nicely - we'd like to lay this growth into a hedge in a few years:

And there's another pollard, which we created to set up a bench for felling, and then left as a handy bird table to leave food on:

now it looks like this, and will be an interesting looking tree soon I think:

That's all for now..

Mike

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100,000 views on my chainsaw video!

I made this video to illustrate felling using a 'boring cut', having learned it on my chainsaw training. For some reason people seem to like it, and today it passed 100,000 views on YouTube! Enjoy (and ignore the cheesy shot of me stood by the logs at the end...):

Mike

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The birds and the bees

Yes, literally. Let's start with the birds:

We saw this Great Tit hanging around a Cherry tree we'd left during last winter's coppicing:

It was only after taking the photo and zooming in we saw the caterpillar in its mouth, so then we waited to see where the nest was. It's amazing how small a space they appear to need:

Anyway, onto the bees. The foxgloves are now in flower, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to photograph the bees feeding there. The trick is to watch the bee go into a flower, and during the few seconds it spends in there you get into position and get focus lock, fully depressing the shutter release just as the bee appears. It works best with flash, even in full daylight:

though without flash you get a nice motion blur on the wings:

There's loads of other insect life around enjoying the warm weather, such as this damselfly

Not surprising really, when you see what a jungle the top of Sweep Wood has become. We might need to go along with a scythe soon and clear the path!

Lower down the hill, where we cut the coppice recently, the bluebells have now faded and are being replaced by goosegrass, or 'sticky grass' as I used to call it when I was younger:

Finally, here's a few photos from the bottom of Sweep Wood, showing it not long after we finished cutting, then when the bluebells were out, and then yesterday:

Mike

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Ashden Awards 2011 finalists announced

Just a quick post to tell everyone that the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy finalists for 2011 have been announced. (If you didn't know, I work for the Ashden Awards)

Click the links below to visit the Ashden Awards website to read a bit about them and see some more photos.

UK finalists

International finalists

If you're particularly interested, then you might like to come to our conference. There's some info on the website, and you can book here.

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Foxgloves are flowering

A little earlier than expected, the foxgloves that started growing last year after we'd coppiced have now started flowering:

There's only a few our so far, and the size varies a lot at the moment, from the tall to the short:

The flowers are stunning though, this is the first time I've tried getting some close-up photos of them.

When this whole bank of them is flowering, it's going to look amazing:

The buttercups are out in force now as well, and this time I managed to get a picture of one without too much of the petals being overexposed:

In an earlier post I had pictures of a plant some readers thought was pignut. Well, I can confirm it is, after taking a better pic of the flowers, and also some of the leaves:

We had some visitors come to walk round and see the effects of the coppicing this weekend, and there was plenty of insect life for them to see. The Peacock butterflies are looking a bit sorry for themselves, as these are ones that have hibernated through the winter:

But there were some healthier looking Green Veined Whites around:

and a Long Horned Moth was ID'd for us:

I'm sure someone said this dragonfly was a Chaser, but I forget the exact name...

and I've no idea what this little guy is:

I'm not great on caterpillar ID either, but here's some pics anyway. I'm going on a course to learn more about caterpillars in a couple of weeks, so maybe I'll improve...

That's all for now. We'll be up in the woods again soon to see how the foxgloves are getting on...

Mike

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