Arob

Happy World Soil Day to one and all! Soil, our alpha and omega.

During dormancy (in winter) but not when frost is expected within 24-48 hrs, at least that's what i go by, but Alec and Gollum are the lads with the experience.

It may be worth indexing this information alongside the role of fungi in de-salinating land in Geoff Lawton's Greening the Desert project. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K1rKDXuZ8C0]Permaculture Greening the Desert - YouTube[/ame] ....make room for the mushrooms!

A very interesting talk on the role of fungi and their by-products in the regulation of natural processes, and so the way we manage our woodland and forest habitats to protect the fungi. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAw_Zzge49c]Paul Stamets - How Mushrooms Can Save Bees & Our Food Supply | Bioneers - YouTube[/ame]

Programme on radio today about climbing Moroccan Cedars BBC Radio 4 - Nature, Series 8, James and the Giant Atlas Cedars

A couple of months ago i happened to notice immature and mature fb's on the base of this Sycamore, noticed it was a little sparse in the crown and considering it was well within striking distance of a bus stop, two well used footpaths and fairly busy road, and close enough to clip a block of flats and a house, it was a tricky one as it was a dominant tree but a call had to be made to the TO. Obviously there is uncertainty with K.d, but as it's difficult to test you just have to weigh it up, having done so i was curious to see extent of decay. We took it down today, removed the crown, felled the stick at a couple of foot then took a couple of rings off below that, then cut stem into discs. So photos show the tree, the fb's, decay in the stump, decay lower down the stump, then decay working up the stem. With hindsight i think that perhaps it could've gone on another two or three years, but the decay is well established and i'm not sure which is the lesser of two evils; remove or retain?

Just a little update, i've been a bit slow getting round to it as had been hoping to get some better pictures, however, having done this pruning work Alec (agg221) kindly sorted, labelled, wrapped and sent me a large parcel of scions (cuttings for grafting) of a dozen or more different varieties. Added to this i was able to obtain a few more from here and there which i used to run a grafting workshop and have a few spares left over to plant up and pass on. In addition to the original course i was asked to run a second and then a third, the latter one being for a youth club. It's all gone really well and people have been really keen and quick to pick up the knack - even the youngsters - hopefully their grafts will take and their trees prosper. In addition to the scions Alec provided some great advice, without his support this could not have turned out as well as it has. Grateful for this i'd like to contribute to continuing this goodwill as best i can by making scions available to fellow Arbtalk users in the years to come (naturally quantities will be a bit limited to begin with as trees establish). The two ladies in the last picture are retired nurses, they came to learn to graft as they are planning to start a community orchard in their town, i don't remember what prompted it, however during the practical bit there was a lot of light-hearted conversation in the room, but it there came a momentary silence, and i took a nervous step back, when the lady standing up said, "...when your hands have performed as many circumcisions as these hands..." We all went home having learned something that day!

Thanks David, looks like it's time to renew my AA membership! (So as not to further derail i'll post this link to another pollarding thread which fills some of my research gaps http://arbtalk.co.uk/forum/tree-health-care/54050-pollards-leave-fingers-not.html)

Just thinking in the UK, i have a new customer who appears to be happy to commit to annual work carried out on a dozen or so trees including a couple of large "pollards" (i.e. topped Pops) and some topped sycamores, having only been picking up bits and pieces of tree work over the past couple of years i was looking to reinforce my understanding of the subject. We have half a dozen sycamores each with differing levels of damage, and with differing requirements, one we hope to 'rescue' by thinning out and allowing a new multi-stemmed crown to develop, another we will thin only because the better option of reducing is not possible due to the lack of leader and hence anchor points (discounting a MEWP on cost grounds). For a further three very ungainly trees forming a line on a boundary we need to balance amenity value against risk, my proposal is to reduce these to an even height and then manage the regrowth on an annual basis with the longer-term goal of selectively pollarding on a 6 year rotation or thereabouts in order to maintain a constant crown cover (so removing stems equal to one sixth of the total canopy each year - targeting the largest stems). The last tree we will lightly reduce to clear property, remove stubs and thin some of the low regrowth. So much of that is straightforward, the main thing i'm looking out for is reference to selective pollarding (thinning) on various cycles, i wonder whether there is a direct relationship between cycling and wound healing - the developed pollard heads of annually pollarded trees suggest to me that numerous small shoots may wall out decay more effectively than fewer larger stems - but i have not evidence in support of this. A further question is to do with the secondary reduction of large stems on a 'topped' tree either to re-establish form or to remove decay, as many people don't want to lose large trees - even if they are misshapen and compromised by 'topping'. Given the huge potential demonstrated by sites like Arbtalk and new opportunities such as GoPro's (i've learnt a lot from a few short Reg Coates films), and given our legacy of topped trees and lapsed pollards in gardens and streets i wonder whether there isn't scope for something which not only aids the understanding of the occasional tree worker such as myself, but also that of the layman such as my customer. But as i say such things may already exist and my lack of knowledge be a lack of my own efforts to research. Phew!

Great thread and pics as ever David, you really seem to make full use of your opportunities. (.....whatever your taste in music....!) Do you know whether the training film will be made publicly available - i'm guessing not as someone somewhere will have to cover the cost of making it? Just this week read an interesting if all too brief paper by Helen Read on pollarding, you mention the forthcoming journal article which relates to pollarded Beech - do you know if anyone is working on lapsed pollarding in general? We seem to have a fashion hangover with quite a number of lapsed urban pollards so it'd be a worthwhile subject - or perhaps it's been covered and i've just not read around enough? ....time to go and add bolling to my dictionary....every day's a school day!

Of course the option to do nothing exists - i took that option for the horse damaged trees myself, but if you never try you never know. As there's little damage likely to result from trying in this case, then why not encourage him to give it a go? If it works i'd be interested to see the trees wound healing response relative to the position of the graft, more generally though it might encourage someone else to consider it as an option in a more critical situation. Similarly if it doesn't work then we might learn from that also. TS - what is the purpose of the mulch? Your spec is for h/w chip, at the risk of seeming pedantic, would you not be better with at least a ground contact layer of something fully or part-composted?

Can't hurt to give it a try - you could try notching as the lad in this video is doing, but as you say using it to bridge. Beech does sometimes graft where branches rub so that is surely something in your favour? I've never tried it but if i was going to i might try using 3 smaller stems over the top - the smaller stems will have a higher proportion of cambium so should take better. I though about trying to bridge graft some horse damaged beech but never got round to it so would be very interested to see how you got on if you decided to give it a go.

...and if you put some mud and snow tyres on the transit you've got a better chance once the tarmac ends

Thanks for creating a very interesting thread Ross. I do not envy you one bit in looking to decide how to deal with this situation. Reading some of the replies in this thread reminds me of just how little i know, but your last comment, is interesting; with hindsight, had you the opportunity to have carried out a Picus or Resistograph test do you think this may have produced results making retention any more of a possibility?

The lads above make fair comment. The best advice i can give is to imagine that you're the person looking to take someone on, what do you want? To make it a bit easier imagine you're buying a machine, what do you want? You want something that does what it says it will do, something that is reliable, that won't be a waste of time and money, and you don't want to buy something to then have to go and exchange it, right? So it's the same with an employee; you want the right qualities in that person, not someone that claims they can do things when in fact they can't, or don't bother. Now look again at your CV, an employer only has this to go on for an idea of your attitude to work. You are saying you have IT communication skills and adult literacy but in this very document you fail to spellcheck, to use capital letters properly, and appear to even get the name of your school wrong. This raises the question how much of this is because you are exaggerating your abilities and how much because you just couldn't be bothered? If you are serious about this then apply the lessons found in the original post here http://arbtalk.co.uk/forum/general-chat/47093-desperate-times-my-silky-saves-day.html at the end of the day it's up to you to put a smile on your face and go out and make it happen, you're still young so go and work for free if that's what it takes to get started. Remember your CV is only one (rarely used) tool in a very big toolbox, know its uses and limitations and you'll be away. Now, when you seriously start applying, when you've got a bit of experience, when know which company you want to work for and why, then use your CV and covering letter to tell them; show how you can fit into their team. Think about if from their point of view, for example, if you live five miles away tell them how you'll get there on time every day, if it's on the bus then it's up to you to go and find out the times the bus runs, put it in your letter "No. 63 runs to your road end, the first one arriving at 6.30am then every 20 minutes after that", the bloke looking to employ you will appreciate that, the last thing he needs is to go looking up bus routes and timetables. If you are keen that is how you can show it, use your initiative, you need to fit in with them, be honest and show some common sense. Putting your home address, mobile no. and email address on a web forum seems unnecessary and a little bit daft imho, but as the saying goes, mistakes come from a lack of experience, experience comes from making mistakes!

Reading that reminded me of a story we were told at college where all of the trees along a roadside died quickly and mysteriously, it turned out that there was an underground gas leak and the concentration of gas in the soil disrupted root function. (Perhaps i should've kept that to myself? ) Anyway back on the main topic, we did a project a few years ago, amongst other things we were removing an earth bank, rebuilding a buckled perimeter wall removing some trees and shrubs then redoing the garden. i cat scanned the site which helped locate the line of the media cable but didn't/couldn't pick up the plastic gas pipe, so we too found that with a grinder. I argued that we acted responsibly, that the recommended depth for service pipe below pavement was 450mm, therefore working at that proximity to the pavement, at the depth we were working we should've been well clear. I argued that not only was the pipe laid without warning tape or any form of cover (aggregate etc) it was laid with a sharp upward incline onto the property meaning it came up to just 1/7 recommended depth. They played hardball saying it was only recommendations and recommendations aren't enforceable in law and advised they'd take it to court as they had done so before and were very confident they'd win again etc etc. I argued their charge of about £700 (?) was unreasonable as they'd only sent two vans out; first just one man in a van to plug the split with some putty, the second van had two men put a clamp on on the mains side, cut out a six inch section and replaced it with a sleeve on either side which was electro-welded to seal, including paperwork it took each crew 20 - 30 mins to do his job. I ended up paying about half the original charge. In addition to that we trenched the line of the pipe to bury it to depth, then covered and laid a warning tape, so that was an additional cost to the business. The first guy that came out, the one with the putty, told us that it is not unknown for builders to plug such a leak with clay, at the time i thought that to be inexcusable, but following my own experience, whilst it'd certainly not endorse such a potentially dangerous action, i would now say that i can understand why someone might be tempted to do that. So sorry about that, would've been nice to say i took them to court and blasted them all over, but i didn't. I did contact the Arb Assn hoping they'd add some weight (was a member at the time) but they weren't interested. At some point before or since i made enquiries about getting the gas board to identify pipe runs prior to starting jobs, iirc they'll happily take a couple of hundred quid off me to show me a rough diagram that they couldn't guarantee to be reliable, nor iirc, would it indemnify me in the event of another pipe strike. Which is interesting.

You're right, it's good to see a programme about people working in woods, my only reservation is that this has been such a shabby effort. If they'd had the motivation to make a programme of quality, such as How Britain Worked - Channel 4 i think they'd have had nowt but praise. Countryfile had an episode a couple of weeks back featuring Ben Law - http://arbtalk.co.uk/forum/general-chat/49783-countryfile.html - you must've missed it

Andy, the company behind this are not known for their commitment to the environment, in recent years they have become well known for pursuing an aggressive approach in the attempt to gain ownership of living organisms. It sounds like the storyline from a thriller, in fact it's what's going on in the world right now. [ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPKoSrc99p4]PERCY SCHMEISER - DAVID VERSUS MONSANTO - YouTube[/ame] See also, Vandana Shiva.

A lot of veg oilers use preheaters to keep the viscosity down, or a two tank system one veg one normal diesel, using the regular diesel when starting (engine still cold) and before stopping (to flush veg oil through) to prevent it plugging the valves as the engine cools. As you probably know, biodiesel is veg oil with the gloopyness (i.e. the glycerine) removed, there are a couple of ways people go about this, the standard way is to use methanol and caustic soda, it's fairly straightforward and you can settle the worst of it out to leave a fairly clean fuel, but what's less straightforward is 'washing' the fuel to get any lingering impurities out, so be cautious of sources when buying it - i know a chap who ended up with a truck off the road and out of action from trying to save a few quid on fuel. The cost of recovery and repair, and the disruption to his business were quite a bit bigger than any savings he might've made. Have you tried a forum such as this vegetableoildiesel.co.uk - Powered by XMB 1.9.11 you might get a more specific response?

So, i didn't really sell it, and it seems no-one else either watched it or felt moved to comment on it, which is a shame as it was really amazing stuff and well worth an hour of your time. *Spoiler Alert!* Basically a Spanish conquistador sailed up the Amazon in search of the reputed cities of gold, sailing up the river he and his crew began to starve yet were surrounded by thriving communities of people, they were kept alive by these people who fed them. This conquistador returned to Spain with stories of an abundant civilization within the forests along the Amazon but he soon fell from favour in the Spanish court and his accounts became lost in history, deemed as exaggerated tales by later generations. Explorers who followed in his wake found far fewer people and the colonising Europeans came to think of this land as barely inhabited save for the occasional small isolated tribe here and there. Mass deforestation in the latter part of the 20th Century exposed vast tracts of the forest floor and people flying over them began to notice strange geometric patterns on the ground, known as geoglyphs. These enormous geoglyphs had remarkable properties being both huge and hugely geometric, their existence pointed to very large human civilizations now long since vanished, and so it seems that early conquistador may well have been telling the truth, and perhaps he and his crew, or subsequent visitors brought disease which wiped out something like 90% of the population at the time and brought those developed civilizations to an abrupt end. There was also a fair bit of comment on how these forest peoples were an important part of the ecosystem and helped to manage the forest in such as way that contributed to the development of it's famous complexity and biodiversity. This was a part of it, there was a lot more besides; all very interesting stuff.

I know than in the US one of the biggest perks an employer can offer an employee is healthcare insurance, although tbh i'm not too sure how this works. In the UK, people earning above a basic threshold pay National Insurance contributions, but this is to do with unemployment and sickness benefits and state pensions rather than healthcare. In UK the NHS is state funded and provides free healthcare at the point of delivery, it is not associated with any kind of personal insurance policy, so any accidents would be covered by that state funding, stats may be recorded but there would be no further effect to the individual involved in terms of increased health insurance premiums. Frankly, given the amount of funding the NHS receives a few accidents here or there would make little difference to any current funding arrangements. In terms of professional insurance it would be unlikely to have an effect assuming that these people were not taking out insurance on their tree work. Perhaps you can explain how it works on the other side of the pond - i think we may forget just how lucky we are here and it's all pretty topical what with 'Obama-care' and all that. (Not looking to encourage a derail btw!)

Did anyone else watch this amazing programme? BBC iPlayer - Unnatural Histories: Amazon

....you should see his house - cob over straw to form internal walls, looks lovely. That Sherwood chap was a repeat and Stumpgrinder, ...... the lady was making the spoon ..... don't think she'd finished it! Anyway hats off Countryfile, some interesting stuff.

I think you might've nailed that there Rich.

I hope that's sarcasm. Either that or you must have a hard head.