Bank holiday weekend - Saturday

We did a lot in the wood over the weekend, so I thought I should break it up into different days...

On Saturday Heather and Rod,who own another woodland nearby, came to visit. They've produced an excellent diary of what they're done in their wood over the past two years, cataloguing all the flora and fauna - it would put this blog to shame if they got it online! We went for a wander round the wood with them, and were very pleased to see this tiny frog at the pond, he was only about an inch long:
We also saw a couple of chestnut stools with these strange roots coming out near the ground. I'll have to find out what's going on, and if it's normal:
Heather was expert at spotting fungi, and also knew the names of most of them. I can't remember them, but here's the pictures anyway:
After they'd gone, we did a few little jobs, focusing on chainsaw stuff so that we didn't make any noise on the Sunday and Monday, to avoid disturbing the neighbours. Tracy cut up some of the trees we'd left full length in case they were needed on Monday - we had a customer come to collect poles for garden furniture. Meanwhile, I cut up some dead logs for charcoal making - we've said we'll supply fuel for a BBQ on Friday:
And finally I cut some logs ready for splitting and storing in the drier:
Sunday's post will be on the way soon, including making blackberry jam in the wood...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Firewood drier extension

Stage two of the firewood drier is now complete and being filled. Having exhausted our supplies of random material to make fences with, the second stage is made from spare chestnut poles we have laying around. These only require two nails per fence, which is nice:
We started stacking wood in it earlier in the week:and by the end of today I had one of the three walls complete and had made a start on the next:
We're up there again tomorrow to continue the work, and meet some people.

UPDATE: view the earlier posts on the firewood shelter:

• Firewood drying shelter
  
• Firewood drier finished

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Firewood drier finished

We had friends from church visiting on Sunday afternoon - Joy and Lauren, along with Emily and Charlotte. We spent the afternoon up at the wood doing a few jobs, having fires and chatting. We didn't cook entirely from scratch, but the potatoes were prepared while we were there:
Cooking was quite complicated, as we had stew, chilli and potatoes to cook, so that was three fires!

Apart from the cooking, lots of other stuff went on, such as Tracy, Joy, Charlotte and Lauren removing twigs from birch we felled last winter to use in track repair, leaving the branches to burn for the cooking. Emily gave me a hand with the firewood drier:
Each "wall" of wood is now supported by a fence, variously made from a trellis, some netting and some chicken wire:There was also room to store the pieces of old chestnut stumps between the split birch to dry, and then the plastic sheet was draped over the top and weighted down:
Tracy and I were up there again yesterday, and started building another drying unit. Our post driver has arrived now, and it made the job of putting in the stakes much easier, and didn't damage the tops of them in the way that the sledge hammer did:
We'll be carrying on with it once the wet and windy weather has subsided...

UPDATE: view the other posts on the firewood shelter:

• Firewood drying shelter
  
• Firewood drier extension

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Copper Underwing

Just a quick one here, after I received some help from Steve Wheatley at Rother Butterfly Conservation on identifying a moth. It's a Copper Underwing:
You can read a bit more about it here. The photo is taken of it on my leg, which is where it landed when I inadvertently disturbed it - it had been sleeping in our shelter! Apparently it feeds on oak, so it's not surprising it was around the cant of coppice we've cut, as there are 15 oaks there in less than 0.75 acres.

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Firewood drying shelter

With the rainy weather recently we felt it was time we made a shelter to dry firewood under, so it's in good condition when we come to sell it in the autumn. We'd had a first attempt yesterday, but it wasn't really satisfactory so we started again today. The first version had involved tying poles onto stakes, but the stakes sticking up above the poles caused a problem, so this time we tried cleaving some larger poles to make rails that could be nailed on top of the stakes.

The cleaving was quite simple, as long as there weren't any nasty knots in the pole. The first step was to hammer the froe in at the end of the pole using a wooden mallet, and then give it a twist:
Once it's started splitting, you push the froe down, twist again, and repeat:
and pretty soon you have two pieces on the ground:
Tracy had a go too, but found it harder as there's a certain advantage to being able to apply some brute force!
We then hammered six stakes into the ground, the central pair being a bit taller, and nailed the cleaved rails on top of them:
I then began carefully stacking the split logs in rows to dry... but was not carefully enough. D'oh!
We gave up and went home for dinner at this point, and have a plan for stabilising the stacked logs, which we'll try in a couple of days.

Anyway, just so you can see how the shelter looks with the roof on, here it is:
The plastic sheet is weighted down by logs at the sides, and angled so water should run off. Our plan is to extend the shelter at the right hand end of the picture above. continuing the plastic along the length of it.

UPDATE: view the later posts on the firewood shelter:

• Firewood drier finished
• Firewood drier extension

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.