Working in a different woodland

This weekend I went over to visit our friends Rich and Penny and work in their woodland. We're actually doing a swap - Rich will be coming to help me put some solar PV panels on our roof in a couple of months - but it was also fun to go and see their wood and work in a different setting.

Part of their wood is a bit hillier than ours, and has more of a stream in it, enough to warrant a foot bridge (under construction):

and a bridge to drive over too:

It was along the side of the stream we were working, using a tirfor winch to pull some large chestnut away from the stream as they were felled.

We had a nice spot for lunch each day, and it didn't even rain on us!

Under another tarp, I saw a nice shave horse Rich had made, and a lovely Hazel chair Penny had done as well:

We should be back in our own wood just for a day in the next week or two, to deal with those two big Sycamore near the neighbouring barn. We've actually just started burning the Sycamore from a year ago, having exhausted our 2-year seasoned supply. Next year I think we'll get right through the winter on 2-year old wood though.

Mike

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"Breaking in" to start coppicing

The first task when starting coppicing a new part of the woods is "breaking in", or creating a space into which you can fell trees. Obviously you start by taking out all the small trees in the area that you can, which this year means Hazel for us. Having done that, it's inevitable that you have to fell some larger trees that will hang up in other trees. However, you can often find gaps between other trees to fell into, if you're accurate with your chainsaw.

We're coppicing a strip between two fields this winter, and the picture below shows the lower edge of this strip. The trees to the right of the photo are staying. As you can see in the foreground, I've already felled some smaller Ash, which were relatively easy to slot between other trees as they came down. The two remaining Ash stems (about 40ft tall), left of centre, are leaning away from me as I took this picture, and there's a large oak behind me, so they can't come back this way. So, you'll see that to the back of the picture (just beyond my chainsaw) I've felled two Chestnut stems (they came towards the front of the picture). This created a nice space to fell the Ash into:

This "breaking in" is actually quite good fun, as it's a bit like figuring out a puzzle, and if you get it wrong then you pay by it taking longer to solve!

In this case I got it right, and each stem yielded a nice pile of logs like this:

The big chunk on top is for a wood-working friend, who'll season it and use the heartwood to make tool handles.

It feels like we're starting to make some visible progress now, after spending a while setting up log racks and collecting pieces for use at an allotment (more on that later...). Here's a picture of the area at the start:

And here's a picture at the end of Friday:

We've already filled one log rack:

and built another which is only just started - if you're wondering why the stakes are all different heights, it's because we're reusing old ones from last year, but not all were in good enough shape, so there's a mix of heights:

I also collected a few sacks of firewood from our store while I was up there - we do this on most trips to save diesel. There was one log I had to leave there though, as it had a caterpillar in a chrysalis on it:

I'm not sure if it's meant to look like that, but I've put it in a safe, dry place to wait out the winter.

I stopped work at the woods a bit early and went to the allotments, where I was putting in Chestnut stakes for a friend there:

I also dropped off some Hazel poles to make a lattice between them. When they're done they'll look a bit like these:

They're ones we put in about 18 months ago, and I think they look a lot better with fruit trees growing up them!

Mike

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Felling some big trees

Seems like we've hardly had any time to sit down in the past week, with coppicing, work and stuff on in the evenings... Anyway, here's an update on the work over the past few days.

This week we had a few larger trees to fell, the tallest being this Sycamore:
First though, some Chestnut at the other end of the clearing we've created needed to come down to make room for it:
There were a few small stems to get out of the way first:
Then we set up a simple rope system:
using the big Sycamore as an anchor for a pulley:
so that we could be stood behind the trees as they came down:
They were dealt with pretty quickly, and we collected some chestnuts that came off them as they fell, to eat later on. Most were too small, but there's a few that were OK, better than last year!
Before we moved on to the Sycamore, I noticed that some butterflies are really making the most of the autumn sunlight we've let in to this part of the wood, including this Red Admiral:
and a Speckled Wood:
OK, on to the Sycamore. Here's the picture of the big one again:
Also, there's a smaller one next to it that we needed to fell too. You'll notice that behind it is someone's garden, and there's a phone line too, so we had to make sure this tree fell in the right direction! To do this we set up the ropes and pulleys to give us a 3:1 leverage. The red rope was fastened as high up the tree as possible, using an extendable pole with a hook on the end:
Then the end of that rope was anchored in a figure-of-eight, which in turn anchored the end of the white rope and a pulley:
The white rope carried on to another pulley anchored to the Chestnut stool we were felling earlier:
and from there back up to the pulley you saw earlier (here it is again):
From that pulley, the white rope then headed down to it's anchor point, well out of range of where the tree would fall, and where we pulled from:
This means that for the force applied at this anchor, double the force was being applied at the pulley attached to the Chestnut (as there are two lengths pulling on the pulley), and triple the force was applied where it all joins the red rope (two lengths on the pulley and the end of the white rope anchored there).

Then it was time to put the cuts in...
and after a bit of pulling it was all safely on the ground:
Sorry there's no video, but we were both pulling on the rope!

Of course, that was only half the work, as it was a big tree to cut up - you can just see Tracy in the midst of it here:
However, it wasn't long before we had a clean trunk - I hope to finally get to use the sawmill on the butt of this tree to see if I can make some planks...
One last thing. We found the branches had a lot of lichen on them. We didn't burn these (or quite a bit of the ivy), but left them in a pile for wildlife.
A friendly little Robin really liked this, and some pictures of him will come in the next post...

Finally, here's a picture of how the clearing is looking from the other end as it grows:

Mike

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Batbox bat detector

After work on Thursday we went up to the wood to cut some logs to length to make a raised bed at home to grow vegetables in, but also took the opportunity to take the Batbox bat detector we've borrowed from a friend and stay until dusk to look for bats.

First though, I need to tell you about the new stuff that's growing. Out in the wayleave the broom is now flowering, which must be a treat for the insects:
Inside the wood the chestnut is coming on well, though it still has a long way to go:
The oaks are also beginning to thicken their canopies:
We noticed something exciting about the oaks. We'd been told a year ago that when we thinned the oaks that the ones left would grow to fill the space over a period of time, and here's the start of it:it's not just in one place, it's right up the tree, on all the trees:
Also, in the gaps left on the ground due to the thinning and coppicing, there's grass springing up where before there was bare earth:
The bluebells in our wood have finally caught up with Sweep Wood, which gets a bit more light:
We also saw this strange bug. Some kind of caterpillar perhaps?Anyway, once we'd had a look around and loaded up the logs we were taking home, we sat down with a hot drink and waited for dusk. (I took this photo of the kelly kettle using a 6 second exposure, taking advantage of the new tripod and wireless remote control I bought for the camera)
Here's the bat detector:It works by converting the ultrasound frequencies of the bats into something we can hear. There's a dial you can tune to pick up different frequencies (20-120 kHz), allowing you to identify different bat species - though we're not expert enough to do this! Here's a little video of me testing it with some keys (jangling keys emit ultrasound!), and then recordings of a couple of bats:

Next post coming up - making the raised bed we took the logs back for.
Mike

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