What a fantastic, glorious and sunny day yesterday. The hazel coppice where I felled the big sycamore is a real suntrap now and I’m looking forward to seeing how the hazel comes back with all the extra light. The bluebells are still around and everything else is bursting into life. I noticed two of my birdboxes had a lot of blue tit activity so I guess the eggs gave hatched. I filled the feeders and within minutes the birds were on them. The robins are always the first, bobbing around nearby as soon as I approach the feeders, almost impatient for me to finish. The Male Fern dotted around the woods are unfurling their fronds.
I had two main jobs on the list – carry on building the screen walls around the composting toilet and finish the underground fridge. After a long wander around, I decided to carry on digging out the fridge hole. I was aiming for about two feet in depth but I’ve settled on around 18 inches. It’s just too hard a job, having to chop through roots and bend right down to scoop out the soil. It’s only going to be used when I occasionally camp there anyway. The lid is to be made of woven hazel rods packed with pine brash. I don’t have any pine but I know a man who has – loads and loads of it, where he has been felling in his plot. I asked permission to take some and he kindly allowed me to. A little shrew scuttled across my path, running for cover, as I dragged a few branches back. I didn’t have time to make the lid yet but here’s the fridge so far. The stone surrounds are left-over scraps from our new garden paving. The whole thing will be covered with the brash lid but I wonder what adventurous animals might find their way in? The sides are rough so they should be able to climb back out.
The two new walls for the toilet are finished. I ran out of suitable logs to do the other two but I might just build them up with some of Chris’s pine brash. Another neighbour has been using some of it for nesting sites for his birds, piling dense bunches between the forks of low branches. He also uses piles of dead bramble, an idea I might copy come Autumn.
It will be a couple of weeks before my next visit, the wood is getting darker as the canopy leafs up and it will look completely different. I guess the bluebells will have gone so here’s one last photo until next spring.
