Big J

Ripe pickings in the Matt column at the moment:

I came across a new composer (to me) with a short piece tacked onto a recital that I was listening to on Youtube. Astor Piazolla - Argentinian and regarded as the foremost composer of Tango music. This piece (Libertango) is great fun, unmistakably South American and fiendishly difficult to play.

An absolute cracker of a heavy leaning ash (I think - I was so horrified by the felling I didn't pay any attention to the tree species) recently felled at Woodlands theme park in Devon. Spotted it whilst there with the girls. I think it's the worst hinge I've ever seen. The tree was a good 70cm in diameter.

Onto the spruce racks now. Steep ground and hairy trees but almost a third sawlog. Did 15t winched, processed and extracted by myself today (with the trees already felled ahead of me). It's productive, but there was a fair bit of brash handling with the forwarder as I had to build a shelf of brash to spit the logs into. The track isn't wide enough and there is a lane below it. Either way, we're only a touch less productive than the harvester operator (who was unable to reach the job in time) and more profitable. It's just a hard graft. I did 5 miles of trogging up and down the hill with the winch line today.

Thanks for all the feedback chaps. I'll have a think. It's just wire, as far as I can tell, but it's not at all old. Which means that some bright spark threaded it through an unthinned sitka plantation.

I've spent about 20 minutes going around in circles, having spoken to BT who directed me to Openreach (who no longer operate a phone service) and then sifting through the Openreach website to no avail......argh 😡 Anyway, we've got a BT line taking a shortcut through the sitka block we're presently working in. The landowner is happy to have the corner removed (it's about 40 odd trees, but they are at first thinning size, so it's not a large area) but we need to drop the line to do it. It'd take less than 2hrs. Can anyone give me a number or a direction towards someone I should speak to to arrange this (in Devon)? It'd be doing Openreach a favour as the line is being contorted by the trees. Thanks in advance.

Beautiful weather here at the moment. Just perfect really - not too hot through the day with blue skies and a slightly crisp morning. Long may it continue.

It's the same argument I use for keeping my older wife. Replacing her with a younger model might seem like an attractive option, but in the end it's much more resource intensive. Perhaps you'd get improved performance, but ultimately you pay for it. 😆 (ps, this post was approved by the editor/censor (ie, my wife) prior to upload - I am sure I have some trousers somewhere, but I sure as hell don't wear them)

I’m spreading the word about the benefits of eating dried grapes. It’s all about raisin awareness

You can blame Radio 4 for that one 😄 Dr Phil's bedside Manner, 18:30 today. Apparently, this was a joke told to a surgeon by an 11 year old he was about to operate on.

Why did Sally fall off the swing? Sally has no arms. Knock knock Who's there? Well it's not Sally

It's not a great photo to be honest. It's actually a rather nice tree, though I am biased towards eucs They don't need to open up the view as the garden is wide, so they have plenty of space to look at the fields. It's the only tree in the garden, and given that it's a fairly large garden, removing it would leave it lacking somewhat.

It's not nitens, so not super fast growing and it's been reduced in the past. What would you do instead?

The tree in question

I admire the original tack at attracting interest for your position, but there is a reason why houses are so cheap in the bit between Edinburgh and Glasgow. And it's not a lack of employment. With the towns and villages, it's like they try to harl (pebble dash) the joy out of their conurbations.

Friends of ours in Wincanton have a fairly small eucalyptus in their back garden in need of reduction. It's an easy afternoons work. Nothing vulnerable underneath it, good access to the back garden and the tree is only about 40ft tall. Please PM me if you can help. Apologies for the lack of a photo. I can get one shortly.

My take on the lorry driver shortage is this. I should add that my dad drove rigid 14 tonners for most of my childhood, so I'm not entirely ignorant of the industry, especially given that most of my professional life now is dictated on how I get timber off site and how much it costs to do so. There is obviously a shortage of HGV drivers, but I think that the problem isn't just down to pay or leaving the EU. There is a fundamental skills issue when it comes to drivers in the the UK, full stop. How many people pass their tests with 10-20 45 minute lessons and then never undertake any further CPC regarding the operation of a vehicle? This has the following knock-on effects: There is a massive chasm in driver skill needed to step up to operating HGVs There is simply no appreciation for the limitations and challenges of operating a large vehicle, so HGV drivers are often at the receiving end of a lot of aggression from other motorists. Beyond the lack of skills of Joe Bloggs, the infrastructure (as has been touched upon already) is lacking to support our hauliers and our road network is horribly crowded and under-maintained. I can imagine that spending 50 hours a week threading a 44t wagon through traffic and hideously narrow lanes (we have a lot of those in Devon 😏) is hell. I personally couldn't imagine anything worse, even with the pay incentives now. If I was in charge (God help us all), I'd make the initial licence to operate a motor vehicle on the road much harder to attain. Take the Finnish approach - if I remember correctly it's a minimum 2 year period on a provisional licence and you have undertake exercises such as skid pan training. If we upped the overall skill level of British drivers, there would maybe be more appreciation for the very tough work hauliers do and there would be more people prepared to step into that industry. As for simply giving people a trailer licence if they ask for one......that's pretty terrifying. A badly loaded, badly maintained trailer grossing 3500kg has the potential to do some serious harm. I regard myself as a very good driver of trailers, but even with 40-50k miles under my belt (at least, it's just a guess) of heavy trailer towing, I still treat the endeavour with the utmost respect and caution. In summary, more training, not less and sort the bloody roads out 😄

3 minutes and 6 seconds. No, not the length of my last love making session.... 3 minutes and 6 seconds is how much sunshine we had today 😄

Pretty crap for the last few weeks here. Have barely seen the sun. It's not that the weather is extreme - it's more like the absence of weather. Grey skies, low temperatures, breezy. Looking at the weather recorded so far, we're on track at the moment to potentially see the least sunny August since records began in England. http://starlingsroost.asuscomm.com/weather/ukobs/ukgraphs.php?type=monthlyregional&param=Sunshine&field=year&region=UK&month=8&sort=ASC

That is seriously impressive. The fastest growing of the eucs we've planted so far are on a site near Chard. They are 16 months old and the tallest in the block was 4.2m as of last Tuesday. It's growing 2.3cm a day though at the moment (it was measured at 3.8m 17 days previously). It's actually a denticulata, but the majority of the block is nitens, with many of them 3m plus. 70mm thick stems 500mm above the ground too. What is the height of your tree and do you have any photos of the full tree?

We're on a nice first thinnings site near Barnstaple with some rapidly grown larch and sitka. It's not been well planted (in terms of spacing, so the rack in the photo starts off at about 5m wide and ends up at lest than 3m, but we're getting through it. Probably the last outing for the Kranman processor, but it's performing brilliantly. It's got about 450t ahead of it to do (at least) but it's ideal most of the block as it's too steep to drive for any small machine. As such, the fact that it winch loads itself saves a lot of double handling. The complete rack (33 trees or so) took only 2hrs to process, and I forwarded it out in another 45 minutes with the Vimek, totalling about 9 tonne. We're not cutting sawlog out of the larch as it's bendy as hell (you could scrabble some, but it's not worth it) but we are cutting 3.7s in the spruce.