Big J

I did shop around a bit. It was the £150k subcontractors employers liability that took it up.

Yep, good point!

You do get some litter on the roads into villages - beer and energy drink cans and McDonalds mainly. Not as much as the UK by a long shot, but it still annoys me! I can't fathom the high insurance costs in the UK. Fair enough, there is a bit less of a chance here of machines being stolen or vandalised, but how can the public liability be so much lower? Perhaps because our work sites are so remote, you don't have any interaction with the public. For the lorry, the roads are huge and mostly traffic free, so less chance of an accident? But then there are a lot of moose and deer. Who knows?!

Insurance costs buttons here in Sweden Full insurance for our forwarder, V8 Scania lorry, public liability and employers liability costs £1020 a year. So £85 a month. It would be fully ten times that in the UK, as I remember my premium for employers, public, general tools and one forwarder was £7600.

Got down to minus 8,8c here last night. Was up on the ski slope helping with snow production.

Minus 3 here. It was that temperature all of yesterday too. It makes for pleasant winter weather - cold enough that everything is frozen, but not actually cold. The only issue is that it would be better if it was minus 5-8c. That way, the lake would freeze properly for skating and we'd be able to make snow on the ski slope (it has to be at least minus 4). The ice on the lake is only about 2-3cm thick. Well at least the bit around the sauna jetty was last night. Water was resolutely 0c. The photo is from a few days ago of our balcony and minus 6.

Yeah, I've asked the landowner to have a word with the cutter about the stacking. Very little professional hand cutting here. The H8 actually excels on very steep ground. There is individually controllable wheel articulation, with about 1 metre of vertical travel on each wheel. It allows it to stay level on steep slopes, as well as negotiating serious side slopes. I agree that it's not the best for soft ground, but it only weighs about 7-8t so it does quite well.

I will get some next week. It might be better to wait until we're on the next site, which is more of a commercial forestry block (as opposed to someone's back garden).

We did a bit of work in North Devon - Minehead and near Barnstaple. The access was a huge issue. The job at Minehead required a 1 mile uphill extraction through a 2.2m wide bridleway to the nearest point you could get a lorry to. And then, no haulier wants to take the timber away as it's in the middle of nowhere. You can get 60t lorries everywhere here. It's nice to not have to think about that anymore. On this site, handcut. It's a royal PITA. But 95% of our work will be following harvesters. There are loads of Rottne H8s around here (the factory is less than an hour away). It's a good matchup with our size of forwarder.

First day out with our forwarder today. It's been a long and difficult process to get started here. A combination of Swedish bureaucracy, Brexit nonsense and people owing me money and not wanting to pay. Anyway, I'm in partnership with a friend here now. He's German, lots of construction machine and lorry experience as well as being an excellent mechanic. He's new to the forest. Together, we can do a lot more than individually, and it's nice not to go it completely alone in a new country. We've started on a fairly complicated and difficult little site for a relative of a neighbour. Just testing the machine out really and it's doing well. Traction is very good, drive system nice, crane a bit sensitive and cabin lovely. It's a Novotny LVS 511. We move onto a normal commercial site next week. We have a 1992 Scania 143M to shift the machine around, which also has a sleeper cab for nights out. This site has one of the best locations of any house I've visited here. Just stunning, on the edge of a 9km long lake.

It's quite straightforward. Quite a few controls to remember, but seemed very stable and secure and drove up a 1 in 3 slope whilst grooming the snow with no problems. As ever, the wonderfully chilled nature of the Swedes was present. The chap driving is someone I've not met before, so I introduced myself, jumped in the passenger seat and within ten minutes I was driving. It was the same with the snowmobile too. I think I mentioned before, but the whole operation is run by volunteers. Not one person takes a salary. It's largely self funding, but there is some support from the kommun (council) for the electricity costs for the snow creation. I'd say that 2 out of 3 skiers there are kids, which is I think why so many of the parents help out with the lifts, snow creation, equipment hire and other duties.

Got to drive the piste machine 😁

Still have plenty of snow on the slopes, but it has been melting. VID_20230114_160102.3gp

I think that my interest in the weather exceeds even that which is normal for a Brit! 😁

Haha! It's a combination of fairly modest rainfall combined with lots of snow melt. What the Swedes here regard as very wet weather/ground would be regarded as quite reasonable conditions anywhere on the British west coast!

It's been pretty wet here lately. We had a good dump of snow a week ago, but it's been raining and 3-6c for much of the time since. Not in the British "raining stair rods" kind of way, but the Swedish forestry machine operators I've spoken to have said they can't remember it being so wet. It's odd though - there is loads of surface water and the rivers are quite full, but there isn't really any mud. The rivers are running clear too. A very different geology to Devon, where the red clay ruled. I've concluded that I actually don't mind rain so much if it doesn't turn everything into a muddy shit-pit. It's the mud and all the difficulties it brought for work/walking the dog/staying sane that was the problem.

It's OK Wallis - you are forgiven! 😁 I would say that neither douglas fir or larch aren't especially invasive. And larch came before the Victorians. Point taken though. Native hardwoods, as nice as they are, don't produce commercially useful timber. Even in an ideal world, devoid of grey squirrels, their slow growth, high maintenance input requirements and harvesting difficulty (ie, not by harvester) means that they aren't commercially viable (well certainly not as a replacement for conifer). But then add grey squirrels, invasive weed growth (requiring extensive spraying) and other invasive species and I cannot see the economic case. You make a valid point about climate change too. As you know, I'm responsible for quite a lot of eucalyptus woodland, and it's something I think the UK will see more and more of. With 40c summers, it's unavoidable. There are odd blocks of douglas and sitka, though I've yet to see any personally. Larch is reasonably common, though at least 90% of conifer is pine or spruce. Birch tends to make it into the matrix and is often maintained throughout the cycle to give some product diversity. There are a lot of different products, even from harvesting sites. The site I did in August had: Timber - both pine and spruce, separated out and marked with a red dot on the end by the harvester 3.1-5.5m, mixed length in stacks Klentimber (not sure of translation) - smaller timber 12-18cm, both pine and spruce, separated out, blue dotted. 3.1-5.5m mixed. Massaved - chip/pulpwood. 3-4.9m. Pine and spruce separated out. Massaved - birch Energived - dead standing spruce/pine. Marked with both a red and blue dot. That's 8 different stacks from one thinnings site. It was still surprisingly productive though. The generally longer product length helps. Production cycle here is around 70 years I believe. Less when you're further south and west and more further north. Right in the north of Sweden, it's 125-150 years.

I don't think that Oak is needed now - certainly not in any great quantity. As a milling timber, if can produce building boards, but structurally, you're better off with larch and douglas fir. More consistent, easier to grade, easier to dry and the production cycle is 1/4 of the length. There will still be a place for it for niche furniture and building, but beyond that, I can't see the point. There are plenty of hardwoods that are (in my opinion) more attractive and nearly all of them are easier to get to the stage of mature sawlog then oak. And there is the drying of oak, which is also a pain from the point of view of a sawmiller.

No. Just reds here. I don't recall ever having seen greys in France or Germany either. No bark stripping here either. Where mature oak grow, sapling oaks dominate like weeds. They don't even seem to get browsed much by deer. It's interesting coming to a country where the forest biome is fairly close to what it would have been. It really highlights just how much our Victorian forebears have to answer for in the UK, filling our country with non-native plants and animals. All the UK grant schemes that have been and are in place to control all sorts of invasive species (greys, rhododendron, Himalayan balsam, Japanese knotweed etc) - with the benefit of hindsight, all avoidable.