Quick on the heels of Saturday’s coppicing course, I visited again yesterday. The weather was fantastic, sunny and there was a definite feeling of spring stirring. The wood anemone leaves are starting to push through and I even noticed an odd flower on one or two. The bluebell leaves are fattening up and it looks like there will be many. I haven’t done any work there for about three weeks and I’m keen to get the hazel coppice area sorted out before the regrowth starts. I still have three largish sycamores to fell but I need help on those. What badly needed doing was clearing away some of the brash that has been left from the previous two winter sessions. Although the bulk of it went into the dead hedge, there were still piles here and there that were causing trip hazards and also taking up space where I want to do a bit more planting. So my first job was to roll my neighbour’s old oil drum, that they use to burn brash, down to my coppice. I set it up on the edge so as not to damage useful planting areas. It seemed like a nice steady-away job but it was hectic work. A lot of walking around with bundles of dead sticks and branches that behaved in erratic ways as I carried then across the the drum. Sort of like carrying an armful of octopi. That took up most of the morning.

The other main job was to move the poles that I had stacked on my cleaving brake. These are what I kept as potential stakes to support netting around the newly coppiced plants to prevent the deer chewing the tops off, which is what happened last year. Some of the poles were quite thick and if split, would make two or even four stakes. I put my newly learned skills from Saturday, into practise. Using a froe and the cleaving brake (a sort of frame that acts like a vice) I managed to successfuly split, or cleave, several of them down. You can see them on the ground here.

My neighbours arrived later in the morning and started to do a bit of felling. A small diameter larch but around forty feet tall. It looked like a wimp amongst some of the others but it proved to be a very tricky one. The nearby trees were close and full of high-up branches. There was no truly clear gaps to aim it at. The tree twisted as they cut it and trapped the chainsaw. It’s then a case of trying to open the cut with wedges to release it. We cut the remaining part by hand and it started to fall, as predicted straight into the next tree. Much pulling on a rope and levering wouldn’t dislodge it. My last remaining solution was to undercut it about four feet up so that the main stem would drop and hopefully release itself. It’s a tricky technique and dangerous as you are close up to it when it drops and with no sure knowledge of how it will behave. Well it took two or three cuts like that and a hefty pull and shove to get it down. Some of the smaller trees are the hardest because they don’t have the upper weight of the big boys to crash through the nearby branches.

The nights are getting lighter and the woodland is starting to wake up from it’s winter hibernation. I can’t wait to see things growing again but at the same time, wish I had a few more weeks to get some jobs done first. People often ask “What do you do all day at the woods?” As if  ownership is just a case of walking around or sitting and looking at things. Well the day just isn’t long enough to do as much as I’d like!