A quick bit of chainsawing in the woods

With the glorious sunshine yesterday afternoon, a quick trip to the woods was in order. The priority was to use the chainsaw to quickly produce some small logs to split up at home for kindling, which was done in pretty short order:

I also took up a treat for the wild birds, which I'm sure they'll appreciate now the weather is colder...

As there was still a bit of daylight left, I popped over to the area I've been coppicing, which is looking pretty barren now the leaves are mostly gone:

I didn't stop long, but managed to make a small start on the empty log rack I'd left there. These logs should be surplus to requirements, so we're able to sell some in future winters (this year we've only got enough to heat our own place...).

It was pleasing to see that the logs in the rack I filled back at the start of September have already started showing signs of seasoning, with a few of them developing splits in the ends:

Looking forward to burning them in a couple of years!

Mike

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Rye Fawkes 2013 bonfire, parade and fireworks - video & photos

Brilliant parade, fireworks and bonfire in Rye last night!

Here's a short video I put together of the highlights...

Loads of burning torches in the parade, and no accidental fires as far as I could see!

though it did look like this guy might have an accident...

Big crowds as usual, thousands of people there!

Looking forward to the next time...

Mike

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Clearing up storm damage while avoiding a hornets' nest!

Meet the European Hornet...

We had to work around a nest of them today, as they were in the storm-damaged oak tree I mentioned in yesterday's blog post. You can just see a couple of them going into the crack in the tree that was probably what weakened it and resulted in the storm damage.

Fortunately they look much more scary (being an inch long and noisy!) then they are, and are actually quite timid and if they do sting it's no worse than a normal wasp sting (see Wikipedia).

Here's how the oak tree looked after the storm:

It took us a while, but after some chainsawing and winch work, we got the broken section down on the ground:

To get it down we looped a 4-tonne sling round the branch near where it attached to the tree - this effectively doubles its strength to 8 tonnes, see the table on this page. We attached a 10-tonne pulley to the sling using an 8-tonne bow shackle - using a pulley doubles the power of the winch:

Through the pulley was a 20 metre 15-tonne steel rope, with one end anchored to a tree with another sling and bow shackle:

The other end was attached to the steel rope that went through our Tirfor T516 winch - this can pull 1.6 tonnes, so all the other components in use are stronger, eliminating the chance of unexpected failures.

That's an awful lot of gear to push through the woods on a wheelbarrow, but it got the job done with us stood at a safe distance from the tree! We even managed to avoid damaging the hornets' nest, so they can carry on living in the trunk of the tree and the cracked bit of the branch which is now on the ground.

We cleared up some coppice stools that had been blown over too, and there are still a few more of these to do before we've finished clearing up from the St Jude's Day storm which hit the UK on 28 Oct 2013.

Mike

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Clearing up after the storm, October 2013

As you might expect, we had a bit of storm damage in the woods after the 'St Jude's Day Storm', which hit the UK in the early hours of Monday 28 October. Nothing too major fortunately, some coppice stools and one oak that kind of broke in half...

Quite a few coppice stools are leaning, and will be dealt with in the next few days:

Some have come right down:

while others had a 'domino' effect:

Note - this is why you have to be TWO tree-lengths away from a person felling a tree...

Some of the stools I cleared up yesterday, after the wind had died down:

There was also a branch in the path by Sweep Wood:

it had come from this oak tree:

Here's a quick video of me using a chainsaw to clear the fallen branch and also a coppice stem that was leaning over a path, taken using a chest-mounted GoPro camera:

The oak tree that split up the middle was up the top of the hill in Chestnut Coppice:

It's made a bit of a mess and I need to go back up there to sort it out with a winch...

Still, could have been much worse, we're thankful this is all that fell!

Mike

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Family visit to the woods

About half of my family were visiting Rye last week, and fortunately there were a couple of days where the weather permitted us to head into the woods...

It wasn't all play though, everyone had a go at helping fell and log some trees:

Some needed more of a team effort!

Josh was delighted that we found this little toad near where we'd been felling trees:

There was still time to sit and relax though, with a fire to keep us warm...

Some of us even stayed on until it was dark!

Of course, the next big thing in the woods is likely to be the Sunday night / Monday morning storm... We'll report on the damage as soon as possible...

Mike

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