Starting 2021 in the woods

2021 has been fairly wet so far around here, but we did get some sunny days and made the most of them in the woods.

Although Spring is some way off, especially with a snowy week about to hit our part of the UK, the plants in the woods know that change is coming. Dog's Mercury is getting going:

Lords and Ladies plants are pushing up leaves that are gradually unfurling:

And the Bluebells are poking out of the ground again:

While we've been coppicing we've saved quite a few chunks of wood like this to pass on to Dengate's Farm Shop, where David is drying them and then turning them into beautiful wooden bowls.

Here's David with a bowl made from some Ash we passed on to him a few months ago:

We have of course been coppicing too - we went back to the top of the hill to fell a few small trees we'd left earlier, which needed a rope to stop them falling into the yard next door:

And yes, I ended up working in a water-filled ditch again...

Further down the hill, here's a few views of how things look now, we're not far from the end of this winter's work:

Just beyond the point where we'll be stopping this year's cutting are a couple of trees that we didn't fell last time round, and they've grown on nicely. First is an Ash:

And then a Sweet Chestnut:

Both are taller than the surrounding coppice now, and I hope to leave them to grow into large trees. Here's the Chestnut just over 10 years ago, when it was looking much more slender:

And finally, a friend was asking how to make stakes using a chainsaw, so I made this short video to show how it's done:

That's all for now!

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Final days of 2020 in the woods

December 2020 brought colder and murkier weather, but it was still good to get up to the woods, especially as pretty much everything else around is closed as we're in Tier 4 restrictions here due to the (mis)management of the pandemic.

The weather did also allow for some atmospheric photos. I tried processing this one two different ways in Lightroom:

You may remember in my last post I talked about the Hornbeam we'd been felling. Well, I'd not got round to splitting it, so that occupied quite a bit of my time in December. It's a tough wood to split, especially in long lengths, so I tend to use a chainsaw to put a slot in one end and then drive steel wedges in with a sledgehammer:

As well as the coppicing, we've also done a few firewood loads for customers:

We spent Christmas Day in the woods - not just because we were in Tier 4, it would have been our first choice anyway! Fortunately we had a nice sunny day:

It was of course chilly, but a fire dealt with that

and we cooked dinner using the rocket stove made by Greenway Grameen in India.

We got straight back to work after Christmas, felling the final stem of a large Holly tree that was overhanging a neighbour's barn. I'm pleased to report that our battery electric chainsaw, a Husqvarna 540iXP, had no problems dealing with it:

We had one more larger tree that was also near the barn, a Sweet Chestnut, and as with all the others we used the Tirfor winch to safely fell it, as shown in this video:

Before long we had it in pieces, some of which will be used to make outdoor furniture for the Community Garden in Rye.

There's still more to do, and we've both spent time staring up at trees wondering where to start!

Once some more coppice is cut, these Holly trees on the border with a neighbour's garden will need to come down, as behind them is a larger Sycamore that will have to be felled. That's a few weeks away yet though...

Finally, on New Year's Eve I went to work in a friend's woodland nearby, and we had a great day for it!

The main job was dismantling some windblown coppice stools, and a bit of winching too.

That brought the 'interesting' year of 2020 to an end. More coppicing and other woodland activity to come in 2021, and hopefully better news on the pandemic front...

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Felling Hornbeam and a Dusting of Snow

It's getting a bit colder here now, and there was actually a dusting of snow in the woods when I was there yesterday:

Of course, this is nothing compared to what was there 10 years ago! And it's also a far cry from the jungle we faced here back in September:

The main job during November was felling this row of Hornbeam, which included multiple stems on a couple of stools - presumably a seriously overgrown hedge from many years ago. They border a garden, and we were wary that they might fall the wrong way in a storm, so we felt it was best to coppice them. Maybe we'll get a nice hedge here in future...

We used the Tirfor winch on most of them, which you can see here, attached as far up the tree as I could get it using a ladder:

Here's a view from the other end of the steel rope, courtesy of my friend Ben, who was helping that day. As you can see, we had the rope running through a pully to offset the winch a bit.

Trees like this always take up much more space on the ground than you'd think they would, but at least Hornbeam is easier to clear up than Holly!

Over the course of a couple of days we progressed along the row, with help from Kitty and Dominic as well as Ben, until we reached the final stem. This was one of the taller ones, and also leaned in the wrong direction and over a neighbour's garage!

So, the winch was of course used again, and this time with a pulley attached to the tree to increase the effective power of the winch:

After a bit of work with the chainsaw and the winch it was safely down, with no damage to the fence behind it:

Although much of the Hornbeam will be used for firewood (and it is really good firewood!), the butts of a couple of the stems have gone to Dengate's Farm Still, as David Dengate is busy turning bowls, and after some seasoning that's what these lumps will be used for. The image below shows two sections split in half to reduce cracking while they dry. It also made it possible to move them, as they were far too heavy to lift on my own in once piece!

We still have three more big trees to come down (Holly, Sweet Chestnut and Sycamore) and some more coppice to cut, so there'll be more news to follow in due course....

Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Start of coppicing 2020

We took a year off from coppicing over the winter of 2019-20, as we'd cut so much wood the preceding two years, but this winter we're back in action again. And for the first time, we're cutting trees we've cut before! Back in 2009, we were working in exactly the same part of the woods; here's links to a couple of blog posts from October and December that year. We're cutting here again because some of the trees we left back then that border a road or neighbouring property were getting quite large, so we felt it was time to take them down rather than risk them falling the wrong way during a storm. 

Almost the first thing to do was to fell an Ash tree, which had been relatively small in 2009 but had since grown to tangle with a telephone line. After using a pole saw to trim the branches around the wires, it was straightforward to fell with a rope to encourage it in the right direction. It was also the first decent-sized tree we felled with our new Husqvarna 540iXP battery chainsaw, and it did the job very well!

 

Rather than use it for firewood, the bottom five metres of the tree went to a friend at Dengates Farm for turning into bowls, like these.

With the Ash tree down, we had space to build a rack to store logs in, and start felling some more trees.

We try to avoid having fires to burn up brash these days, but given the relatively confined space we were starting in, we had to have one fire near the start to create enough space for us to work. Leaving the brash in piles to rot rather than burning it reduces pollution, creates habitat for various creatures, and is also less work.

With the volume of brash in our way reduced, progress accelerated:

This view is looking back along the footpath towards the road, and to the left of the path in the distance is some Holly, which had grown a lot since 2009 and was leaning over the road and a power line - a potential recipe for problems in a storm....

So, we got to work with the winch and chainsaws, and now there's a gap where there hadn't been for a long time! It was a shame to take down a large Holly tree, as it was really good habitat, but the proximity to the road made it necessary, and it will regrow too - but we'll try to keep it at more of a shrub size in future, rather than letting it get large again.

It was the same story moving along the bank, where the wood borders a farmyard:

One bit there was a bit tricky, with stems so tangled that they could not be felled individually. So these three came down in one go, using the winch.

You can see the grey sling in the next photo, which held the stems together as they fell, and was also what the winch attached to:

I did of course have to spend some time working in a water-filled ditch again, just like I did 11 years ago!

Here's a view looking back towards the road, the people who live opposite have commented on how they enjoy the light that's now coming in to their homes! Of course, the trees will grow back, but at least they'll get a few years of extra light.

You can see the effect of that light from further down the hill here, creating some atmospheric photos:

That's all for now, back with another update soon.... Mike

Click here to read the rest of this post.