Sunburn in the woods in January!

Nice sunny day today, and I called in to our friends Tom and Jane to help fell some trees in their garden, one was just a conifer that was getting too big and shading the garden, the other was a eucalyptus that was leaning after the recent storms. Tom has a chainsaw too, so we were able to work together on them.

I actually got sunburnt on the back of my neck! Quite unusual for January!

We then headed from Tom's garden into a part of the woods that he and I manage together, and dealt with some of the recent windblow there. It'll all come in useful next winter to feed Tom and Jane's woodburner!

I showed Tom a few new techniques, such as using a pole cut from a small tree to lever a bigger hung up tree after we'd severed it from the coppice stool:

Nice to get a good load of logs from the work!

Mike

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A job finished

We've finally finished cutting the trees in Sweep Wood that bordered a garden. The final day of work
included an awkward limb that we wanted to get down while we had access to the garden:

We came up with a plan though, and got stuck in:

Just checking it's going to fall safely and that I can get out of the way...

In with the felling cut:

Half way down... It's Hornbeam, so is very strong and the hinge doesn't easily break during felling, unlike Sycamore.

A bit more persuasion and it came gently to rest on top of the hedge, from where we could cut it up and tidy it away:

Leaving a much neater border tree at the corner of the garden:

Here's the site now it's done, with the brash mostly put back over the fence to make a dead hedge:

We got some hefty chunks of Holly and Hornbeam out of the work, which are now back in the wood:

I got straight on and split them right away, while they were still green:

Last but not least, we also found this when we went to top up our bird feeder...

Pesky squirrels had chewed their way into the bird seed container we'd left up there, and then managed to get the lid off... I guess we will have to rethink this bit of the plan!

Mike

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CS32 Medium Tree Felling chainsaw course - felling oaks

I've had some time off work this week to do the CS32 Felling Medium Trees (380-760mm) chainsaw course. Our instructor is David Rossney of Esus Forestry Training - Tracy and I did the coppice harvesting efficiency course with him a few years ago too. Basically, after this course, and exam, I'll be qualified to fell trees up to 30" diameter.

There's some felling videos to come in a moment, but first a few pictures. We've been learning about properly removing the buttresses of the trees:

How to make an accurate gob cut when the tree is wider than the chainsaw bar:

and also about high-lift felling wedges:

and how to use them:

OK, here's a quick video showing just the highlights (i.e. trees falling) from day 1:

If you'd like to see the whole process, and what happens on the CS32 course, here's me felling a tree:

More videos in a new post here...

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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