February brought a week of cold weather, giving us the first proper snow in the woods for a few years:
With temperatures staying below zero for several days, the ground was rock hard and we took advantage of this to get a few loads of logs processed for customers and ourselves:
Here's how cold it was - an icicle formed on the corner of the trailer, from road spray!
It's nice to see the log store at home beginning to fill up again, ready for next winter.
Alongside the snow we had some murky days in the woods, but the coppicing is now completed!
We were saved some work at the end because our neighbour wanted us not to coppice some border trees in order to retain a screen for privacy, so they paid a tree surgeon to pollard them instead:
We were left with a pile of logs for firewood, and that was all we had to deal with!
On the final day coppicing I had a small stem do a 'barber chair' - this is why you don't lean round the back of a tree while felling it, even a small tree like this can give you a bit of smack, and a larger one can kill.
By mid-March, Snowdrops were emerging at the top of the hill:
And the Bluebells were steadily growing, we're looking forward to them flowering!
The Wood Anemones were also starting to come out at this point, here's one of the first ones I spotted. There's more now, photos to follow in my next post...
We did have a bit of time to relax with a hot drink too, but a fire was certainly necessary as it's been quite chilly most days!
A different project I was working on was mushroom production. Here's some sections of oak branches soaking for 24 hours - interesting to note that green oak doesn't float!
The logs were them drilled and mushroom spores inserted, with a plug of wax melted in on top of them. The logs are now down at the Community Garden in Rye, and we might start getting a harvest towards the end of the year...
The mushroom logs came off an oak tree our friend Rich had felled. Here's a short video of him using his Land Rover to haul the butt of the tree into place for later sawmilling:
And finally, back at home our cockatiel Pete is keeping a careful eye on the outside world. Probably a good idea, the way things are at the moment!
A local school recently asked if I could supply them with various items of wooden seating to use in the small area of woodland they have access to. Of course, I was delighted to supply them with what they needed!
I took the opportunity to try out a new idea for making the benches. I started with a couple of slabs trimmed from coppice stumps, and used the chainsaw to cut a V-shaped notch into each:
I then used these to support the log being made into a bench, which gave two immediate advantages - first, it stops it rolling around, and second, it elevates it a bit, so you don't have to bend down so low when working on it:
The next step was the usual one, as shown in my video on how to make a bench, cutting notches for the feet in what will eventually be the underside of the bench:
Now for the next new bit - rather than setting the bench on its feet to cut the seating area, I rotated it a quarter turn:
I then pushed the feet into the notches, just to check they were exactly vertical:
Then, I was able to walk along with the chainsaw, using it to slice a thin layer off to make the seating area. This is easier to do in a straight line from above than doing it from the side with the saw horizontal, and much more comfortable too!
The only downside was that having the saw at an angle tended to leave more chain marks on the wood:
But they quickly disappeared once I put the bench horizontal and did a quick skim over with the trailing edge of the chainsaw bar:
And I was left with a rather nice bench!
The school wanted some simple log stools as well, so I selected some suitably-sized logs to cut up and transported the results with my log trolley:
I even managed to get it all into the trailer and the car in one trip!
Here's the end results, delivered to the school field:
In other news from the woods... the Bluebells are growing, having had the first shoots pop out the ground in the second half of January:
And this hen pheasant has been following me around. She nearly ate some bird feed from my hand! Far too tame for her own good I think...
Back in Rye, we did get a light covering of snow one day in January, but it only lasted a couple of hours and there was no time to go to the woods and photograph it there...
I've also been playing around with my Carry Freedom Y-Frame bike trailer, and now have it set up to run on my mountain bike. I tested it out hauling about 25kg up and down a hill, but I'm not convinced I'll be bringing all next winter's firewood back this way...
Talking of firewood, the insulation I installed in our dormer roof a few months ago has certainly done the trick - it looks like we might be using about 30% less firewood than before!
As is traditional when it snows in Rye, people go out in their cars and get stuck on Rye Hill. So I went out with my GoPro and videoed it this time! I did also end up helping push five cars up hills...
With the snow over the last few days, I did of course have to make a trip to the wood to see how it was looking! I'd been busy at a Recycle Swap Shop earlier on Saturday, and as I had the trailer with me for that, I collected some Holly we'd felled into the garden of a woodland neighbour and headed into the woods with it...
There's a moderate amount of snow, but not as much as last winter:
I got the Holly moved onto the stack of green wood, and split up the big lumps - looking forward to burning these heavy logs in a couple of years!
Not sure we're going to get any more snow in the coming week or so, but there's still all of February...
Yesterday I posted pictures of snow in Rye, and now here's some from the woods. I'm just going to post a selection of the ones I took, you can view the full set on Flickr (higher resolution there too).
It was pretty chilly, but we were wrapped up warm, and took along some food for the birds...
We didn't stop to sit round the camp fire...
But we did get the same photo we've taken in the past, with snow on the Sweep Wood sign:
There were a few trees that had managed to catch enough snow to bend or fall, like this Birch and Hazel:
The wayleave had something of a blockage too...
Sadly our Alder Buckthorn had also fallen over:
So we grabbed a bow saw and did some emergency coppicing so it could go back into the ground. Hopefully it'll recover...
I'll finish of with some of my favourites from the pics I took:
