An antidote to London

I spent all of last week in London for work, so the weekend was a great opportunity to make up for it by camping in the woods, which are looking great at this time of year.
We took it easy on Saturday, and walked in the wayleave to do a butterfly count to feed into the local Butterfly Conservation database. Here's a few of them...

White Admiral (in our wood, and the wayleave):
Tortoiseshell, which we don't see very often up there:
Meadow Brown:
and a mystery one - any ideas?
Heading back into the woods, it's amazing to see what's happened to where the footpath got a bit muddy with us extracting wood there last winter. The churning of the ground, combined with the light let in by the coppicing, has made it a fertile place for grass to grow up:
As it's not being driven on again (perhaps ever?), it'll be interesting to see how the grass gets on.

I was pleased to see that the young oak we had to pollard a year and a half ago (after it was accidentally damaged) is doing well:
and that a slightly older, but still quite young, oak near the footpath/ride junction has responded to the extra light by putting out dozens of side-branches:
Near the pond, foxgloves have arrived. Not that they're rare, it's just nice to see new plants appearing:
Another new pant there is this one, which I think is a Spearwort of some sort:
Back near our camp, the chestnut that we coppiced first, back in 2007/8, has now started to flower!
I'll be interested to see if any fruit develops...

Saturday night we had light provided by solar PV:
which is also handy for charging your mobile phone:
Sunday was a work day, and we set to levelling out the ruts in the path:
After doing this we thought we'd better test it out, and completely emptied one rack of logs into the land rover:
leaving just a few depressions in the ground behind:
and moving all the wood into a location where we can access it easily this winter:
I know this means moving the logs more than once, but we want to get them out of the deeper parts of the wood while the ground is dry, so that we don't churn the tracks up in the winter.

That's all for now...

Mike

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Test drive!

No, not a car, a track! After lots of digging by us and helpers over the past few weeks, we finally thought it was ready for a test run with the car:More follows in the rest of the post, including the rest of the "test drive" pictures, pond repairs and a weird fungus....

The car came in (backwards, in case it got bogged down!)....
and out again:
and the track held up nicely:The interesting thing was that the soft bit, where we'd laid a load of birch in the mud, sank a bit, but then sprang back up again! We'll continue with this method.... We've also heard from someone with more experience than us at managing a coppice that brash of all kinds can be helpful buried into the wheel ruts, as long as it's cut short so it doesn't flick up when a vehicle passes over.

We also did a bit of digging at the pond to fix the damage by the boar. We don't mind this, it's the price to pay for having them around.
we also saw a strange fungus over in Sweep Wood, growing on the side of an ash tree:
Mike

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Track repairs - again!

We went up the wood for dinner yesterday, along with all the family:
After eating though, it was back on to the job of track repairs, this time in the wayleave where it enters the wood. Same procedure with birch and mud, except this time we had lots of helpers!

Not looking too bad by the end I think! It needs a bit of compacting, and grass on top, but that will come with time.

Mike

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A peaceful evening in the wood

Well, it was just me and Tracy this evening in the wood - Cath and my parents had gone to the beach. It's amazing how much everything is growing up there now. The chestnut:
the bluebells:
and the oaks:
I didn't just take pictures though, we carried on with the track repairs. Here's yesterday:
and here's today, with some of the water drained out, and birch laid in:
and here it is at the end of this evening, with alternating layers of birch and soil in the rut to the right. You can see the trench to the right of the track where we got the soil from - this leads into the culvert, so should help dry out the track a little as it is uphill from it. There's still a lot to do, and to be honest a lot of the track will wait until we get a digger in - it's just the worst bits we want to tackle now.
We built the fire up a little, mainly so the embers are still warm tomorrow to make lighting it quick!
though it was nice to keep warm, as we stayed until after sunset:
As we left we could hear pheasants screeching and an owl calling. We tried rolling down the wayleave with the lights and engine off to see if we saw anything interesting. We didn't, but it was a strange experience rolling along without all the usual noises!

Up there again tomorrow afternoon - the weather looks good for the whole weekend!

Oh, and for those interested in cameras, the above photos were all taken with my new SLR, and the later one of the track was in the shade, well after sunset at ISO800. it's amazing how much less noise there is with a digital SLR - I wouldn't even attempt that shot with my other camera.

Mike

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Track repairs

With all but one oak butt out of the wood, we thought it was time to start on some track repairs. As my family are visiting and it was a nice sunny evening, we all went up to the wood, along with a friend of my Mum's who's also in town.
First up was draining the water from the ruts left near the culvert:
In the winter we'd dug a channel to take the water out - now it's deeper:
but that only drains the rut on the downhill side (left in the picture below):
so a channel has been dug to link the two. (It's my Dad in the dazzling jacket...)
Quite a flow was gurgling into the coluvert by the time we were done:
We'll check back tomorrow and see where the water level is.

The other thing we started on was laying birch twigs into ruts and covering them with soil:
The idea is that the twigs help bind the mud together so that when a tractor next goes over it, the mud doesn't squidge out of the way so much. A crude composite material I suppose? Anyway, we'll see how it goes...

The weather's looking good for Saturday, maybe OK for Sunday and MOnday, so hopefully we'll be in the wood every day over the long weekend, especially as my brother and his family are arriving too. Monday will hopefully be the big day, as we've invited people up from church as well and will have a fire and BBQ.

Mike

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