Big J

A few photos of the trees from today, to illustrate size, situation and dieback. 185 trees or thereabouts. Some very large (4-5 cube), but most in the 1-2 cube range. Around 400 cube all in I think. We'll get the felling licence done this evening, so anticipate removal in August.

I'm very sorry to hear about your mother. As regards the ash, it's not great. It's pretty similar to a batch that we sold in January. The best of the batch went out at £75-78/t and the second grade (which was similar to yours) £65/t.

Ordinarily, I'd agree. In other woodlands, we make every effort to retain ash and fell affected trees only. The difficulty here is that the space is so restricted that it's a fell them all or don't fell any sort of situation. Given that the footpath is reasonably busy, leaving them standing isn't an option. Additionally, we can just about cover out costs if we do the lot (it's a 3/4 mile haul up a steep slope, with a total height gain of exactly 100m, and the felling is quite technical) but if we have to pick through, it could prove very expensive for the land owner, and we might well have to just clearfell next year anyway when the majority of the rest die. I'm there first thing in the morning, so I'll take some photos to illustrate the issue.

Every tree there is in range of the footpath. Most are directly above it. 25m trees on a 15-30m wide strip with the footpath in the middle. Going to site first thing in the morning and the licence application will be in tomorrow afternoon I'll be intrigued to hear what the Euroforest consensus on is.

Due to the length of the extraction route and given that most of the timber is firewood, there isn't the money in the job to allow topping out. Also, I don't know too many tree surgeons prepared to climb dead ash. I just got off the phone with the woodland officer for our patch and she said to get the licence in and she'll fast track it in 5-6 weeks. This is ideal as it works well for the gap in the diary that we have to do it.

I can't say that I disagree, certainly not in principle. It's a tough sell though as there aren't too many of us out there that aren't going to work hard in order to give our kids (and their kids) the best start in life. Selfish desire to look after one's own trumps utilitarian philosophies!

Sadly that's only just a touch more than the average house price around here (which stands at £290k). Combine that with any other assets you might have and the government will get their pound of flesh, sure enough.

Had an interesting job come in today. As part of a much larger woodland, there is a strip of about 3 acres of densely grown, massively overdrawn ash, sitting at the foot of a deep valley. It's a long strip, perhaps 400m long and 25-30m wide, though only 10-15m of it is flat. The access to get the ash out isn't too bad, as decent (albeit steep) tracks exist. In terms of space to fell the timber, there is very little, with a steep bank on one side and a river on the other. Quite a few would require winching, and it's not easy work. The woodland is fairly advanced in terms of chalara fraxinea, and around 30% of the trees are dead (with some looking like they died last year). A further 20-30% are in sharp decline, and the remainder are OK at present. The issue is that of all of the trees in this 150 acre woodland, this is the only place with ash. And as luck would have it, it's the only place there is a public footpath, which is directly below the trees. The woodland owner is justifiably very concerned about the liability of having 90ft ash standing dead above the general public and would like them removed quickly. I spoke to one of the local woodland officers with regards to the stand, and whilst the dead and dying trees would not require a felling licence, the trees still alive would. The issue is that there is no space to fell anything, and the only safe way to do it is to fell the lot. Attempting to squeeze dead trees through narrow gaps between live trees is going to result in a lot of hangers, and given the brittle nature of dead ash, none of my cutters are going to entertain that idea. The woodland officer suggested that perhaps an arboricultural survey prior to felling (as opposed to a felling licence) might be an acceptable way to go. With 95% of the trees likely to die on that strip (it's almost entirely ash) and the only safe way to remove them being clearfell, there isn't much of an alternative. I think it would be most sensible to get them down in September/October, which given the switchover to online felling licences means it would be very tight on timescale. What would you do in this situation? It's not a desperately easy job, with big technical felling required (with quite a lot of winch assistance). It's one that does urgently need to be done, as it's on a site extremely close to the local epicentre of ash dieback and the trees are quite far gone. Do I put the licence application in and wait or commission a tree safety survey and get it done a bit sooner?

But necessary. God only knows what would happen to the place if we started complimenting each other ('s looks). Best to nip it in the bud!

The intention is to build the forestry harvesting and management company over the next 20 years or so and then sell up, either as a going concern or simply component parts (machines). In a few years we're intending to start a sustainable building company, focusing on the provision of low cost, high quality, carbon negative housing built empathetically in conjunction with support from local communities. They would be price controlled, mainly for key workers (emergency services, care workers, teachers etc) and people working in the locality as part of the rural economy. We'd tee this into the forestry business by restarting a sawmill to provide the raw materials for the houses, with the aim to have 90% (or more) of the structure of the house to come from a 50-100 mile radius. Modular, prefabricated, locally grown houses with an emphasis on healthy internal environments and sensible and considered development planning (so folk don't feel like sardines in a can, jammed into little rabbit hutches as is the case with so many new developments). The hope is 15-20 years of that would result in us doing larger and larger developments, making a meaningful contribution to the local housing stock and eventually provide us with a decent pension to retire on. Life would be a damn sight easier if I just stuck to doing one thing, but I'm only happy plotting and master planning for the future! ?

I can say categorically that I owe a significant chunk of my business to you Steve. I've got long term customers (8 years plus) that I met through Arbtalk, have found the bulk of my sub contractors on here and have learned a huge amount from other contributors too. Hats off good sir ?

Apologies for the crappy photos, but the big machine is now here. Not exactly low impact, but still technically a thinnings machine! I'll have to wait to get started on it until next week though as the site is really wet, especially after the 5 inches of rain we've had in the past week.

To echo Andrew, it's a lot of experience and qualification for the money offered. I'm not saying that the salary isn't reasonable, only that £30k doesn't go very far these days, or come close to freelance/self-employed rates for a similar role.

Drought stress from the extreme summer last year I wonder? Did you water them through the hot spell?

Visited one of my sites today and loads of very fresh damage to the beech. This tree was 10 inch dbh roughly. Huge areas of bark stripped.

My uncle (in his mid fifties now, having recently retrained again as a climber, after doing it for 10 years or so in his 20s and 30s) prunes commercial fruit orchards in south west Germany as a climber. He works 5 hours a day typically, 3 days a week at 50 Euros an hour. It's a good life I think!

This was a roadside sapling that I walked past the other day that had died suddenly and spectacularly

Dead ash everywhere around us in Mid Devon. That said, I'm up in Edinburgh at the moment and it's quite evident around here too. There is going to be a vast amount of work coming up on removals.

Pine martens are apparently the single best control measure for greys. Where the numbers of martens has increased, the greys have retreated and the reds have started to reestablish.

If I were starting a firewood business I would look to maximise automation and minimise handling. So large capacity firewood processor, log deck with old forwarder/tractor with timber trailer to load it. Conveyor off with well-vented potato boxes to be loaded. Boxes taken by small telehandler to one of several large polytunnels for drying (good halfway house between natural drying and kiln drying). Box rotator on telehandler to load into segregated tipper for rapid deliveries of part loads. You'd need to be doing at least 2000 cube a year for it to be worthwhile, and I'd try to focus on softwood due to more rapid drying times and quicker processing. But I wouldn't start a firewood business to be honest.

I very much doubt that Packham would get behind not culling grey squirrels. The broader environmental damage they cause is so extensive that it would take someone tremendously blinkered to make a case for not controlling them. Can I just stress, every single young hardwood stand I've seen since moving to Devon has moderate to severe squirrel damage. Considering that on plantation format planting, you're 2500 trees per hectare, you have a planting cost of £7500 minimum, plus maintenance. Without significant squirrel control between the ages of 10-50 years, you'll end up with a woodland full of bushes, with almost no commercial value at all. At a grey squirrel talk the other day, the forestry consultant presenting it used the example of a large estate they manage in Hampshire. On a significant replanting block, they calculated that without squirrel control, the stand would have an eventual value of £2.5m. With £500,000 of squirrel control during those vulnerable years, the final value of the stand was worked out to be £11m. They are not native. They are responsible for the demise of our native squirrel and they extensively damage the eco systems they inhabit. People need to stop anthropomorphising them as cute little woodland dwellers and instead shooting the bastards on sight.

You should get some Eastern Europeans in. They'd clear those pesky trees, double quick. Take advantage of the migrant labour whilst you can! ?