Diary of a man and his woodland

A blog about a man's dream to own a small woodland.

Tag Archives: woodland management


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The silence of the woods in August

Yesterday was a beautiful dry and sunny day at the woods. In fact too dry for too long now. The trees are starting to show signs of distress from a shortage and some of the leaves turning brown and dropping. My pond is just a sludge of decaying leaf matter. Partly my fault because I should have cleared as much of the leaves out as I could but lack of visits there this year has meant many of the maintenance jobs have been neglected. However, the wasps are loving that sludge. A source of water and material for nest building and although most people hate wasps, they are an important component of the ecology and a friend of gardeners. They help pollinate and eat many harmful pests.

I started the day by lighting a fire. There were some rotten wooden garden chair and table remains that were unsightly and I wanted to tidy them up. The easiest way was to burn them. I know that burning wood that has been varnished is not ideal but how else do I dispose of them? Our council has closed our recycling centre and even if I did take them to somewhere like that, how do they dispose of them? Incinerate probably. So I thought burning was my best option rather than letting them rot and pollute the ground. No perfect solution to the problem but it seemed the least harmful to me. Apologies to anyone who is offended by that. I don’t like it either but we are all polluting much worse than that every day in some way. I did have a couple of brews on the fire and enjoyed that.

The woods were incredibly quiet and hardly any birds to be seen. A wren and two crows were all I saw. At this time of year the birds go very quite. They are exhausted from the breeding season and also moulting which compromises their ability to fly, so they take a welcome break. This might have been a victim of that compromise. The remaining feathers of a predated wood pigeon. They appear to have been plucked out suggesting it was killed by a predatory bird.

Other jobs included loading up three trugs with firewood logs to finish filling my logstore at home and some more scything of my paths. The brambles have run riot in my absence and I need to be able to move around a little without getting constantly snagged and prickled. Tough and hot work but necessary. The other job was to net off a hazel stool from deer browsing. I had coppiced it in spring but didn’t have time to net it then. I thought I would have been back more frequently to do that but not so and the deer have eaten off the tops of all the new growth. It will recover but netting it will help. By now the new shoots would have been at least five feet high already. The long ones you can see are what I left on when I cut it back.

One of my woodland neighbours, who I haven’t seen for ages, was in his woods chilling out with his wife, making stew and bread over a fire. I had a walk over and spent some time catching up. It was so lovely to be sharing their company in this beautiful setting. I always like to take people to see mine but there is something unique and satisfying about being with other woodland owners who are equally caring and passionate about it. They kindly offered to share their food too but I had just eaten and was pretty full but thanks S. (I know you read this blog and your offer was much appreciated).

I hope to be back there soon and spend a night if the weather holds up enough. Not that I am purely a fair weather person but sitting around a fire at night in the pouring rain is not a great recipe, though not impossible. I once stayed over a few years ago. Had just got my fire going nicely for cooking over when the skies darkened, the wind blew up which told me a downpour was eminent. I fixed a tarp up to sit under and made a Heath Robinson contraption out of a wooden pallet to create a lean-to roof over my fire. The rain came down in a torrent. The fire hissed but stayed lit as I sat dry under the tarp. The experience was fantastic.


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Early spring in the woods but cold

Flowers on box tree

Spring is definitely showing in the woods, leaves of hazel, elder, honeysuckle are opening. Wild garlic, bluebells, dog’s mercury, lords and ladies, nettles and wood anemones are pushing through the ground and opening. We are into March already and inching toward the Spring equinox. Photo below is lords and ladies also known as cuckoo pint and many other folk names.

Although my main purpose for the visit yesterday was to carry on with the log splitting, I spent the first hour just wandering around and observing, sometimes straying into areas I don’t normally visit. I noticed a few things that might be jobs to do next visit This old oak tree has the remains of a dead branch. Most of it has rotted but the centre heartwood will stay on for years. The tree bark has attempted to grow around it to seal it but is unable to. If the branch had broken close to the trunk it would have. So I might do a little bit of surgery to help keep it healthy by sawing off the dead branch close to the trunk. There’s an area where the branch joins the trunk called the collar. The cells here are supercharged to grow and effectively heal any open cuts. So by cutting off the dead wood, it gives the tree an opportunity to heal over it. If you look further up the trunk you can see two lumps where this has happened successfully.

My neighbours arrived, we had a brew and a catch up but the cold air was prompting me to start some work to warm up. I set-to chopping and stacking more of the sycamore logs until I was starting to flag and ready for a lunch break. I don’t rest long as I get restless when there’s still work to do and the hours soon fly by. For a bit of variety I started clearing the brash (small branches from the tops of the felled trees) and piling them onto an old brash hedge that had now rotted down to about a quarter of it’s original height. A few tree guards on saplings had been knocked over accidentally so I put new stakes in and secured them vertically again.

On my walkabout earlier I spotted this young laurel bush growing robustly. This is an invasive species planted in woodlands around the country by the Victorians as cover for game birds. There are areas in other people’s woodlots here where this is rife and it seeds and germinates easily. So removing this is on my next job list.

This is an interesting thing I found on my walk. It’s hazel and what caused this was a sycamore I felled about five years ago, hit this rod and partially snapped it, leaving it horizontal. It’s continued to send new shoots upwards. In a few more years, these can be cut from the horizontal branch keeping a short piece either side to make walking sticks with T shaped handles. Happy accident!

I chopped and stacked a few more logs but by now my back was complaining so I called it a day. Here’s how it’s looking now. One more session and it will be full and can be left to season and I can crack on with other projects.


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First shoots and hard work

One of the first new shoots, this is honeysuckle. There are some tips of bluebells just pushing through too and elder leaf buds are starting to open. I can’t believe we are half way through January already but I’m happy with that. The daylight is just starting to stretch out a bit.

Yesterday was a break in the wet and windy weather we have had last week. It was sunny and barely a breeze but the strong winds had broken the branch that the bird feeders were hanging on, so first job was to reposition them and fill them up.

I took my chainsaw to cut up the three small sycamore I had previously felled, then chop and stack for seasoning while still fresh and easy to split. Because it was so calm, it was ideal for felling a few more, there are still dozens of weak or misshaped trees that need thinning out. So I decided to take advantage of taking three more down. The first was tricky, it was in the path of the other two, so I needed to remove that first but it looked like it’s natural lean would make it fall the wrong way. I used a technique of first cutting the bird’s beak at the front, then plunge cutting the middle out, sticking some wedges in to stop it falling back before taking the last piece of the back cut. It worked but it got hung up badly in another tree. It took several undercuts and pulling with a rope to free it. Hard work indeed. I’ve left them to deal with next visit.

I filled my trugs with dry logs to take home and soon it was lunchtime. I took a tin of soup to heat up in the camper but first I needed to wash out the new nesting pans I had bought specifically for the camper. They are just anodised aluminium and didn’t cost much but will do the job.

Next job was to cut up those long logs from the previous felling, split and stack them in my new logstore. Back aching work by the time I had finished but hugely satisfying. These will be in storage for seasoning for two years.

Lovely satisfying day and to think I nearly didn’t go! Here’s a few photos from my walkabout. Below is a huge beech tree, the sun catching the top.

Lovely sunlit hazel stool

Squirrel drey high in a beech tree


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Vernal Equinox – Spring

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.