Yesterday was going to be a working day. I’ve spent the last few months mainly having fun and just enjoying the wood but it was time to get busy with some felling – thinning out. I wasn’t looking forward to it but the window in time is short, Spring will be here always sooner then you think. Felling and using a chainsaw is a dangerous business even for professionals let alone an amateur like me, so I always approach it with a healthy dose of fear.

I could have picked some easy ones to start with but the decision is a bit like eating a slice of apple pie. When I was a child, Mum used to make big apple pies and cut slices for us but I didn’t like the crust. Leaving it wasn’t an option back then, you simply didn’t waste food. So do you leave it till last allowing yourself the easy, full pleasure of the main part, with plenty of filling and sugary topped pastry, or do you get the worst, unenjoyable bit over first so you can relish the best bit. Well I always ate the crust first.

There’s a single tall oak tree in the middle of the sycamore plantation area (where I’m thinning) that needs more space to thrive. One of the sycamore trees that needed to come down near it is a large forked tree. I’ve been putting it off for a couple of years, it was never going to be an easy fell but yesterday’s decision was “crust first”. Another tricky one was next to the main ride so I started with that. It fell just where I wanted but, unfortunately and unavoidably, the top half landed in a neighbour’s plot and knocked over a small oak tree. I needed to cut up and remove all the tree straight away. That must have been at least half a ton of timber to carry and stack.

The big one next to the large oak was a real challenge. When assessing which way it would naturally fall, it wasn’t obvious. You look for a lean one way, look at the balance of large branches which might pull it in one direction. This one wasn’t obvious but I chose to aim it to the right of the oak. As I cut it, it didn’t move naturally (too well balanced) so used some wedges to start it’s fall. It went as wrong as was possible. It twisted and hit full on with the oak. After a few seconds of violent flapping and dead branches raining down, it settle bang in the middle of the oak. Normally with small trees, you can get a rope around it and with some serious sideways tugging, dislodge it but even with the help of my friendly neighbour, it wouldn’t budge.

This photo really doesn’t show you the scale of the problem. because of their lanky height, they don’t look all the large but the trunk is about 14 inches diameter and the height of them must be about 50 feet. It is safe for the moment so I just had to leave it. By this time my physical and mental energy was running out. I had successfully felled two more with no problems but now it was time to try to rescue the neighbour’s small oak I knocked over. It had half uprooted it so I figured I could re-erect it and prop it up and with a bit of luck, it will re-establish it’s roots in a year or two. My neighbour helped out again and hit the nail on the head when he said, “It’s ironic, we spend ages taking trees down and now we are having to put one back up!”

Sorry I don’t have many interesting photos or much else to tell. These are the ones that came down easy, the middle of the apple pie! See you next time, hopefully with the big tree safely down.