Link to our story in Coutryfile Magazine

Remember we were in the BBC Countryfile Magazine a while ago? Well, the story's online now, you can read it here: A wood of their own

Mike

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Radio 4 "Costing the Earth" interview us

Yesterday afternoon, Tom Heap (presenter) and Martin Poyntz-Roberts (producer) visited us in the wood to interview us about wood-fuel and owning a woodland. The programme will go out later this year in the next series of Costing the Earth, on BBC Radio 4.

There was still quite a lot of snow on the ground when they arrived, which made for some good crunchy footsteps for the radio!
Tracy wasn't at all convinced by the microphone and recording equipment:
so she left me to do most of the talking! A lot of it was technical stuff on using wood as fuel for heating, so it was more my department anyway...
Seeing is it was radio, they wanted some sound effects, so I felled a small stem for them, while Martin recorded the noise of the chainsaw:
then Tom came and got his hands dirty, using a billhook to sned the stem I'd felled:
He also had a go cleaving and splitting with the maul (he was very good at this):
Martin was very pleased with the sound effects he got from both of these activities! It was interesting doing an interview for radio - you have to be really quiet when they're trying to get a recording of something specific, and think about how you're describing things so that people will know what you're talking about even when they can't see it!

Mike

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We're in BBC Countryfile Magazine

A couple of months ago we were interviewed for the BBC Countryfile Magazine, and it's out in newsagents now. We're pleased with the article - 4 pages of it! There's some nice pictures in there and a good description of what we're doing and why.

Mike

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BBC Countryfile magazine

Yesterday we were interviewed by Miriam O'Reilly for the BBC Countryfile magazine, as they're doing an article on people buying woodland and working it. It all went well, she asked lots of good questions and we look forward to seeing the article. A photographer, Adrian Arbib, came with her, and he stopped for a while afterwards to chat with us as he was particularly interested in what we were doing. We had a good chat about the current events in energy and finance, and why owning a wood was a good idea because of them.

I didn't take many photos as we were busy, but here's a great one of a spider web with dew on it first thing:
After they'd gone we did a bit of work, mainly splitting some of the birch we'd already felled and stacking it to dry. I did the big bits with the maul (splitting axe), while Tracy did some smaller bits with the froe and mallet.
We sharpened our chainsaws too (always much nicer to do this outdoors), as we're going on a coppice harvesting course all this week, to learn some new techniques. I hope to do a few posts covering what we're learned. We're doing the course with David Rossney of Esus Forestry, who trained us both in chainsaw use and tree felling.

Mike

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