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:
- safety - if they are hung up in another tree they can potentially fall at any time and injure someone
- returning them to health - if they are still alive, then felling the stems and settling the stool back in the ground will sometimes allow the tree to recover
- ease of working - windblown trees are in the way when coppicing.
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
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