Track repairs

With all but one oak butt out of the wood, we thought it was time to start on some track repairs. As my family are visiting and it was a nice sunny evening, we all went up to the wood, along with a friend of my Mum's who's also in town.
First up was draining the water from the ruts left near the culvert:
In the winter we'd dug a channel to take the water out - now it's deeper:
but that only drains the rut on the downhill side (left in the picture below):
so a channel has been dug to link the two. (It's my Dad in the dazzling jacket...)
Quite a flow was gurgling into the coluvert by the time we were done:
We'll check back tomorrow and see where the water level is.

The other thing we started on was laying birch twigs into ruts and covering them with soil:
The idea is that the twigs help bind the mud together so that when a tractor next goes over it, the mud doesn't squidge out of the way so much. A crude composite material I suppose? Anyway, we'll see how it goes...

The weather's looking good for Saturday, maybe OK for Sunday and MOnday, so hopefully we'll be in the wood every day over the long weekend, especially as my brother and his family are arriving too. Monday will hopefully be the big day, as we've invited people up from church as well and will have a fire and BBQ.

Mike