Christians Against Poverty charity bike ride

Well, London to Brighton was good last year, but this year a small group of us decided we'd do a 50-mile local tour, with sponsorship to raise money for the debt counselling work of Christians Against Poverty, splitting the money between our local church and the national CAP UK work.

Here's the highlights! (if you're wondering, my nickname is because of the GoPro camera that sprouted like a dalek eyestalk from my bike helmet...)

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

A new woodland ride

I've just finished one of my main jobs this winter - cutting a new ride in my friend Alex's wood, but before I get to that we need to have a look at a few pics of our friend Andrews dog, Dougal, coming on his first visit to the wood. He's a Jack Russell Terrier, and very inquisitive but well-behaved too.

I've put a cover over the wood that we moved down from last winter's cutting, to keep the rain off it:

Anyway, on to this year's work. I've been cutting this ride to create a path into a small clearing we created a couple of years ago, to provide access to extract wood from future coppicing work, and also to add a feature to to the wood which should improve it both visually and for wildlife. So, for Alex, here's a walk-through series of pictures:

I've saved some of the straight stems in 5m lengths for a bridge-building project in the spring, which is needed to get across the seasonal stream at the start of the ride. I need to find a couple more trees for this job, and also level off the remaining stumps in the ride, but the bulk of the work is done now.

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

London to Brighton bike ride 2011

Well, the bike ride was Sunday, and it all went well - despite it lashing down with rain as we set off from Rye! We had a generally dry ride, with quite a bit of sunshine, and completed it with no major problems. It was just under 52 miles in total, and Rob and I did it in just over 4.5 hours of actual cycling, or a bit over 5.5 hours if you include lunch, and other short breaks like stopping to help someone fix a broken chain. Many thanks to Tracy and Ros for driving us there and helping us back as well. And thanks to everyone who sponsored us to raise money for CAP.

I've made a video of the ride using my GoPro camera. The full version is 13 mins and is probably more suited to people who've done the ride themselves, or are going to, and there's also a shorter 6 min version for those who don't want to watch the long one.

Full version:

Short version:

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Coppicing update

Unlike today, with torrential rain and strong winds, yesterday started sunny and calm, with another hard frost:We made good progress on the coppicing, but first a few other pictures.

Here's a buzzard circling over the woods. Sorry it's not a better picture, but as the bird was heading away there was no time to swap to the zoom lens. We saw a couple of them earlier in the week as well, but didn't get a picture.
This wasn't the only bird overhead, a flock of seagulls came over too. They looked like they were on a mission of some sort - it's rare to see them over the wood, they're usually down at the coast.
I've mentioned before that, where possible, we've left standing dead wood while coppicing the rides. Here's why:
And here's the biggest piece of standing dead wood (well, OK, it's only part dead):
OK, to the coppicing... We completed cutting the sides of the footpath all the way up to the junction yesterday, so here's a series of pictures walking you up the footpath from the stile to the junction. Our wood is on the right, and Roy & Patricia's is on the left.The final one is looking past the junction, where we'll be working next week. The junction is where we're in the process of creating a small clearing, simply because the merging rides form most of it anyway. At one edge, where we're yet to cut, is this coppice stool:
but just behind it is a jungle of honeysuckle:
We're hoping that once the stool is cut then White Admiral butterflies and other insects will be able to get to the honeysuckle easily, making this a busy and interesting clearing.

Although it all looks quite desolate at the moment, it will be completely different in six months time. Remember what happened in the cant we cut last winter? In March it looked like this:
But then by summer we we're seeing sights like these:We're looking forward to it...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

The start of a new clearing

As I've said before, we're coppicing along the edges of the rides and footpaths in and around our wood, to widen them and let more light in, so benefiting wildlife like butterflies, other insects, and the creatures that feed on them. So what happens where the ride from inside our wood meets the footpath at the edge of it? Well, we're shaping it to be a small clearing. Here's the progress so far:

first a photo from last week:
then one from the end of today:
Don't worry - I've not blocked the public footpath, the ride on the left goes into our own wood, while the footpath goes right, and you can still walk round the log pile anyway.

The sky is opening up above the rides, just waiting for that springtime sun to come in...
It may look like I missed a few small trees just where the rides start to diverge, but there's a reason:
The clearing-to-be is filled with honeysuckle! This will be great for White Admiral butterflies, if they decide to venture down the newly widened rides next summer... There's more in other spots around the junction too:
As always, we're working hard to preserve it during the felling, and leave standing dead wood and the occasional live tree where it is growing.

Tracy's also got some preservation work to do, starting with felling this group of birch trees:
The reason? There's a young self-seeded oak next to them, that will benefit from the light that will be let in: She didn't actually get to fell those birch today though, as other trees needed to be felled first to make a space for them to fall into. She did cut 15 other ones down though!

A couple of interesting odds and ends now. First, another piece of woodland archaeology, in this case what looks like a fuel or oil tank of some sort - there's a filler cap on the end of the cylinder, which is itself made of metal gauze. I guess coppicers in years gone by didn't bother taking machinery home when it broke...
And second, what is probably the last large mushroom of this year, still frozen this morning:
That's all for now, we're working in the wood again on Thursday and Friday.

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Meeting of the coppicers

Friday was the day we met on the path! The stretch I've been coppicing joined up with Tracy's, meeting under the holly tree. The last tree to come down in Tracy's stretch was this one:
You can see the holly tree in the distance, and beyond that the newly opened ride, with just dead wood left standing (where possible). There's about 100m coppiced now.

We also had a fire going on the edge of the cant we cut last winter, burning up the brash left over from last weekend and the school visit.
This had the added advantage of providing a ready source of hot embers to get the fire for lunch going.You can't beat a hot lunch while working in the wood in cold weather, and even better cooking it on wood instead of fossil fuel. One trick we've picked up when cooking curry, as we did on Friday, is to add the rice straight into it with some water. OK, it means your food is ready mixed, but it means you only need one pot cooking instead of two.

On Thursday we'd also tried cleaving some of the freshly felled birch in 2m lengths, it worked quite nicely:The idea is that by splitting it long it will stack easily while drying, and then I can saw it up in the rack we stack it in, as I did with the chestnut recently.

Now the first straight of the footpath is coppiced, Tracy's continuing on from where she was while I've jumped ahead so as to be a safe distance while felling. The area I've moved to is where the public path meets the ride that passes through our wood:
As with any part of the wood, it has some unique properties that must be taken account of, such as some young oaks. They don't look like much, be we will be taking care not to damage them during felling so that they get the chance to have a few years head start on the coppice regrowing. Here's one that's a few inches across:
and here's another much younger (the small one nearest to the camera):
It's good to see this natural regeneration going on, I just hope they don't get eaten by squirrels, as happened in one of our friend's woods.

Another interesting thing in this area is the large amount of moss on some of the coppice stools. There's at least four types on this one stool!
We'll be cutting these high to allow the moss to continue to grow.

Here's the progress from the first couple of hours at my new spot, just clearing brash and breaking in, creating a space to fell the larger trees into:

It's been dry for a few days now, so we're planning to take the trailer up and collect some more firewood for our customers tomorrow.

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.