I’m planning a family day at the woods in a few days time, so wanted to get a couple of things done and sussed beforehand. Now the big sycamore is down, I thought I’d better continue to cut it into moveable logs. As often the case, some of my plans don’t happen. It was a glorious dry morning and it felt like I’d entered my piece heaven. Lots of fresh new growth springing up and some tree leaves opening, birds singing and no-one else there but me. I like socialising but I also love the head space of being alone in a beautiful setting like that. I spent a good hour and a half walking around, drinking coffee in my shelter whilst watching the birds, before doing anything that resembled work. After a heavy winter schedule of felling etc it was just nice to be able to savour the experience of just being in the moment and taking it all in. There’s a (slightly cheesy) expression being used for the health giving and de-stressing qualities of being among trees – “forest bathing”. It pretty much describes the feeling though.
Some time ago I buried a big metal box in the ground to secretly store some tools. It was a pain to access it, so I decided to dig it up. Rather than just fill the hole with earth, I wanted to make it into a sort of “critter hotel”. The idea is to fill it with loose rubble and small logs to create a labyrinth of small spaces for things like toads, rodents, insects etc to shelter or hibernate in. So the next photos show the process.
Covered back over with a small layer of earth and leaving some “doorways” should make a nice home for the “little ones”.
You’ll remember on my last visit, I spent a lot of time on the W.T. photography project and almost lost all my photos when the memory card threw a wobbly. I needed to retake a few so that was the next task which I can happily say are safely on my P.C. now.
My composting toilet has very little privacy – I ran out of materials for the wicker walls and they have shrunk down too. Now that I have neighbours and the toilet is close to their border, I need to provide more screening. The idea of using hazel rods from coppicing isn’t going to work because I just don’t have enough. So plan B is to build walls around it in a similar way to a log cabin. It will provide a good shield and last a long time. I need them to be about nine feet long and as I had brought the chainsaw, it was a spur of the monent decision to fell a few of the tall scraggy sycamore that need thinning anyway. After doing the big ones recently, it was a breeze to take four down and cut them up. Not such a breeze to lug them all back to the logshed for future processing! They were only a few inches diameter but when full of sap, they are a fair old weight.
The last little job was to transplant a few ferns. They are just emerging and I read that it’s a good time to split them. I want to increase ground cover diversity in one area. I tried with one but think I messed up with the splitting and ended up with two sad looking, curly stalks. I planted them anyway and moved a complete one so we’ll see how they fair over the new season. More woodland tales to tell next week.
