Moving logs and making a fire pit

Earlier in the week we tried a new way of moving logs around the wood, and it worked pretty well:
It's possible because we've been steadily filling in ruts in the main ride in our wood - they've been there for many years, and were quite deep. now the land rover can make it through with no problems. This will be our main way of getting out everything we cut last winter, though we'll probably stack it higher.

Another neat thing I tried is something mentioned on the survival course we went on. The idea is for a fire pit with an air tunnel to the base of it. Obviously it's only worth doing this for a place where you have fires over and over, but we have that in the wood. Our version used an old steel pip that had a bend in it as the air pipe. I dug out the fire pit a bit, and then buried the pipe in the ground:
once we had a small fire going, there was a good draw at the other end of the pipe:
I'll take some more pics of the fire another time, but I reckon it could do with a bigger pipe for more air.

And now for a few pics of stuff growing. The broom in the wayleave is flowering beautifully:
and my raised bed of blubells has done OK this year:
(I kept it propped up when the windblown tree was felled, as I thought it was a nice feature)

We've had a lot more bluebells near our camp this year, they've steadily increased since we coppiced there in 2007/8:
The other wild flowers in our coppiced area are coming out in force now, such as Tormentil:
Heath Speedwell:
Thistle (not flower yet, but many more of them than last year):
and last of all, a new flower I've not ID'd yet:
Please leave a comment if you know what it is.

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Tormentil...

... is the name of the mystery flower. Thanks to Sean for the tip. The only puzzling thing is it has too many petals, but the leaves are definitely right. A hybrid perhaps? Here it is again:
I wasn't around last weekend, hence the lack of new photos from the wood. We did pop up briefly on Monday night, but that was just to take some materials for track repair. We'll be doing this again on Thursday I think. We're trying to fill in some of the tractor ruts in the wood so that when we eventually get our land rover we'll be able to drive right through!

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.