Yesterday was the Vernal Equinox, when the length of day and night are pretty much equal and also symbolises the start of Spring. It’s over two weeks since the last visit and we have had the “Mini Beast from the East” last week. The bitter cold weather of the last few weeks hasn’t stopped the slow stirrings of life at the woods. As you can see, the bluebells are coming along nicely, thriving here where I brushcut the brambles down in Autumn. The first wood anemones and Dog’s Mercury are also coming through now.
I still had some brash tidying up to do after the winter’s felling and was keen to get as much done before the ground cover plants take over. There are two areas to clear up and I set-to first on the hazel coppice. I’d left some rods on one of the coppiced stools to be layered. Basically you split the stem part way through near the base, then peg it down to the ground and in a couple of years, it should have rooted and made a new plant. I did two like this the first year and they had rooted nicely, so I dug them up and replanted in some gaps. I stacked some logs and shifted some brash and am happy with that area for now. I have some rather big piles of brash but they will also provide lots of kindling for fires when dried out.
The day started with a rain shower so I had a go at putting my mini tarp up over my bench to protect the equipment I tend to leave out on it while working. It wasn’t a perfect set-up but it did the job ok during the several short showers.
The other area to clear was the top sycamore corner where the big felling had been done recently. There is a dead fallen trunk there which had ripped a hole in the earth where the roots were. I thought I could make use of it for wildlife cover and stacked some small sticks over the hole to create a den for something small and vulnerable. It made sense to stack the brash over it too. It’s not so much a dead hedge, like the ones on the borders as it’s not there to form a barrier. It’s common in woodland management to pile brash in long lines known as windrows like this. It creates new habitats for all sorts of things as it rots down and returns the nutrients back to the earth.
I put in a lot of hard graft, determined to make a difference and left feeling totally knackered but happy. Compare the area straight after felling to how it looks now.
