Odds and ends

Just a couple of things that didn't really fit in the post on the snow. But lets start with a picture of the moon through the trees:
First thing to mention, I tried an improvement to the firewood processing method. One of the problems I'd found was that on the last couple of cuts the logs tended to move around a bit, so I tried strapping them up:
It worked quite nicely, you just have to position the strap so there's no chance of cutting through it!

The other thing to mention is that Tracy unfortunately snagged her chainsaw trousers with her saw:
It's annoying, as it's only a small tear, but it went into the protective material, so we've had to order a new pair at £70. Still, better than a trip to hospital...

Mike

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Catching up

Monday and Tuesday have been days for catching up. We took a break from felling trees and got on with more mundane jobs like sharpening the chains on the saws and making stakes. We bought a new wheelbarrow recently (we still have the old one, but it's not very good), and it's proving to be the most useful thing we've bought for the wood in a while!
The stakes are being used to make racks to hold the firewood logs while they're drying over the next few months, but are also where the logs will be sawn to different lengths as required by the customer. As I've now got a 28" bar for my saw, we can make these stacks 2 feet across. There's a video of the whole process here. Here's an empty rack, ready for the next trees we'll be felling:
We had to go back and make racks for the logs from trees we'd already felled. This is a bit of a pain, as it means we handled the logs twice, but on the other hand it means you can stick with felling for a whole day, then stacking the logs for a day, with no need to keep changing the tools you're using. We're not sure which is best, but for the next couple of weeks we're going to build the racks first, and put the logs straight into them. The only possible problem we've thought of is that they'll be in the way when felling, but we'll see how it works out...

Here's a rack part-filled, and some spare stakes. You'll notice that midway between each pair of stakes is a small vertical stick. These are put in after the first layer of logs, and the idea is that we can tie some twine round the logs, the stakes and the stick, so binding the whole lot together to make sawing easier. We'll report back in the summer on that...
Here's a few of the stacks dotted around the path. They take up a lot less space the the loose piles we had earlier, as the logs are stacked higher.
The other catch-up job was splitting the off-cuts:
These are from cutting off stumps and spare bits when sawing logs to make bearers, etc. We use them mostly for fires at the wood and in the little stove to cook our lunch up there. As they're already sawn to a short length, it's not much work to split them and gather them up. To be honest though, we don't get round to collecting them all and some go mouldy - but that's OK, as we want to leave some dead wood around for the wildlife.

The last little job was making a present I needed. I used a wire brush to clean up a bit of long-dead coppice stump we'd found lying around, and dried in the firewood shelter. Using a wire brush is a lot slower than paying someone to sand-blast a trailer load, but I think it produces a nicer effect:
That's all for now. We're both doing our "desk jobs" for the next couple of days, but will be back in the wood on Friday.

Mike

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Firewood processing video and autumn leaves

Yesterday I posted some pictures of the new way of processing firewood that was suggested to us. Well, here's a short video showing it in action (video is in high quality mode, so pause it for a bit before playing):

Before long we had a trailer full ready to deliver to a customer. The splitting will of course be easier with the stuff we've just felled, which we plan to stack in long split lengths, and saw up next summer.
Last winter we made a fire to burn some brash, and the patch left behind obviously had no plants or seeds remaining in it. It's been interesting to watch it be recolonised. It's now covered in moss, which has started to seed by the look of it:
New plants are also doing well at the fringe of the pond (no ID on this one yet):
and quite a bit of grass has sprung up where we cut the coppice last winter:
Many of the leaves are off the sweet chestnut now, except the coppice regrowth, which doesn't look remotely ready for autumn. The oaks still have many of their leaves too:
As the leaves go and the wood gets lighter it becomes easier to take photos. Tracy got this one of a squirrel:
I know they may look cute, but they aren't a native species and do a lot of damage to trees, so we're going to start controlling them soon, by shooting with an air gun. We're planning to eat the meat from them, so they won't be going to waste...

One tree that produces great colours in autumn is the Wild Service, and ours has lost a lot of its leaves now:
You'd never believe these came from the same tree, would you?
Mike

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Raised beds and a new firewood method

Today was a day for delivering mostly. It was raining quite a bit, but dried up as the day went on fortunately. The first job was to deliver some logs and stakes to a customer to use for a raised bed:
Unfortunately the size of the bed had changed since we last visited, so we came past again on another trip in the afternoon and brought some more logs to fill the gaps. It works, but it's not as neat as I'd have liked - the log to the right is a bit small, so I might look for a fatter one to replace it:
Anyway, the stakes worked nicely and the customer was pleased with the end result:
Then it was back to the wood for lunch. While we were sat down we noticed this Red Admiral sunning itself high up an oak tree:
must be catching the last dregs of summer!

Tracy wanted to cut a tree down after that (I think she's missing the smell of burning 2-stroke fuel after last week's coppicing course), and there are plenty that need doing this winter.
Then she got on with loading the trailer with firewood for another customer. We cut this lot pretty small, as their fireplace isn't too big, and they were bone dry after being in the shelter for a couple of months. While she was doing that, I got to work on a more efficient way of producing firewood, that I hinted at in a previous post.

The idea is that you split the logs while they're still quite long, using wedges and a hammer. These logs were cut about 8 months ago, but this winter we'll split as we cut them, so they'll be much easier to do.
Then, having split them you stack them between posts, with rails underneath. The gap between the posts is chosen to be just a bit less than the length of the chainsaw bar:
Then, you simply saw through the whole lot in one go!
leaving them in a moderately ordered pile ready for loading into the trailer. After the first cut, you move back to the next posts and do it again:
It's quite a bit quicker than cutting the logs individually and splitting them with an axe, and it also allows you to be more consistent in the length of the logs. I still need to make a few adjustments to the position of the posts, etc., but it worked pretty well first go!

(update: there's a video of the process here)

For the wood we cut this year, we're planning to split and stack, but then leave the stacks to dry, cross-cutting them to the lengths required the following summer. There's a particular way of doing that stacking, but I'll talk about that when we get to it...

Mike

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Firewood and beetles

I had numerous jobs to get done yesterday, including visiting a firewood customer to see if we can get the car and trailer into their property. In the afternoon I went up to the wood to split some firewood, while Tracy was teaching. I found a strange thing on top of a pile of offcuts when I got there:
It's a pile of dead beetles:
I can only imagine a bird had been eating them there. Any other ideas?

Anyway, I got on with the splitting. Last year we left the offcuts until later, and they got very hard to split, so this year I'm doing them as we go along:
I split up some more birch too:
However, we have a new plan for how to process the firewood quickly, that we learned from Tim Saunders (the guy who did our oak thinning for us) of Rother Forestry. He was teaching a training course on Coppice Products that Tracy had organised. It's a bit difficult to explain the firewood plan without some pictures, so when we try it I'll write about it.

Tim also showed us how to split chestnut for post&rail fenching:
We're at the wood again on Friday to do various bits of work, including some more firewood processing and delivery.

Mike

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