the village idiot

It's actually destined to be a temporary runway. We've got a customs dodging cargo plane load of chocolate hobnobs due next week. They can also get jammy dodgers if anyone wants to come in on it?

MULCHER CULTURE. So, after a site assessment from Daniel, the operations manager at Kingwell Holdings, this monster of a machine turned up at the Wood. It is quite a few tons of German engineering with a 400hp engine powering a 2.5mtr mulching head. The beauty of this machine for us was that it only penetrates the ground to the depth of the rotor teeth. Only the top couple of inches of soil are disturbed, but anything above ground level is eaten for breakfast. Perfect for grinding away large stumps. The plan was for the machine to remove the stumps from zones 1 and 2 of our 3 zone ride edges so that we could then mow the regeneration on a rotation with our tractor and chain swipe. We had calculated that we could just about cover all the rides in the Northern portion of the wood (50 acres) in the 5 days we had the mulcher for. Our 'back of a fag packet' calculation proved to be way out. The mulcher was so effective that the North Wood was completed in one and a half days, leaving us with three and a half days to do all of the other rides we had opened up. This was most excellent! Steve and I had spent two days with a hired in large saw taking the biggest stumps down a bit as we thought this would speed up the subsequent mulching process. This turned out in hindsight to be a complete waste of time. The Mulcher hardly even noticed passing through stumps like the one above. Even the colossal multi-stemmed Ash stools several feet in diameter only kept the mulcher head busy for a minute or two. After 5 days of carefully supervised mulching we had covered several miles of ride, 5-7 meters down each side, and several miles of access track, with not a stump left in sight. The outermost zone (zone 3) was left un-mulched down each ride edge. We wanted this to develop into shrubby coppice growth to be cut every 10 years or so with chainsaws. Zone 3's were not going to be mown so stumps weren't a problem. Below are some pictures of the mulcher in action. In the last picture you can clearly make out the brambly zone 3's left to carry on growing. This looks like a seriously heavy intervention, and it is. We are very confident however that these ride edges will green back up in no time and develop the lush, vibrant and varied habitat that we are after. Only time will tell if we have seriously over-reached with this one, but we did our homework and are anticipating spectacular results over the next two to three years. A special shout out has to go to Justin Kingwell. He is the owner of the company and was our driver for the week. There is no terrain where he is not prepared to take his very expensive machines. The concrete roadways didn't phase him a bit, nor did the potential prospect of the odd unexploded bomb! He mulches on regardless with a happy smile on his face. It was a joy having him around. The regeneration of the vegetation on these ride edges is going to be monitored by our conservation guru Juliet. I'll keep you all posted on how they develop. Next up, firewood. The revenue generator.

Thanks saintsman. You are right, a SSSI designation does (literally) score you more points when going for the grant payments, particularly the multi-annual payments. Your woodland has to achieve a certain points score to be considered eligible for grant assistance. As mentioned before, it is debatable whether it is worth going for the multi-annual payments (for general improvement works) if the woodland area is very small. Even if it is a SSSI. The designation doesn't get you additional money, it just scores you more points. The payment (if your 'woodland score' is high enough) is a flat rate of £100/hectare/per year. I'm not sure the money received would be worth the paperwork hassle on a woodland under 10 acres or so in size. I may even be right in thinking that blocks of under 5 hectares automatically don't qualify for this type of grant assistance. You can however join blocks together to make a bigger woodland area if you have scattered small woodlands on the same holding. I could do with double checking this, and it could all change when we go over to the new ELMS grant scheme in a few years time.

Well that's my stereotypical image of a group of burly oil rig workers well and truly up in smoke. Who'd of thought you actually all sit around all day making fine silver jewellery!

It's a valid point. To my knowledge we didn't require any special permissions. We certainly weren't asked to provide proof of any. The spoil was spread in a thin layer around the periphery of the ponds inside the Wood. I guess you may need authorisation if you plan to spread spoil on nearby fields. These works are best carried out in Winter to limit disruption to newts and toads etc. Carting the spoil out of the Wood on winter rides is likely to churn the ground up significantly unless you hit a series of particularly hard frosts. Spreading the spoil on the forest floor is not ideal either, it's one of the calls you'd have to make as the woodland manager.

This is pretty much what happens with us. We have been allowed to get on with it. We are required to do visual checks for signs of potential habitat for a few protected species before work commences but it is not an overly taxing task. We may have just got lucky, but the people who oversee our operations are generally very pragmatic and there is little to no interference. The various government departments want to see more woodland management taking place, and in my experience they won't try to stop you if you can show them that your intentions are good.

Thanks Jake, I'm really pleased you're enjoying it. Generally speaking FC permissions are all granted as a direct result of the acceptance of the woodland management plan, where future felling activities are set out. We don't have to apply for separate felling licences every time we start in a new area of the Wood. If you are working a SSSI the management plan also needs Natural England approval. If you don't have an agreed management plan you can still do felling work but you would need specific felling licences for each job. Some works can be carried out without permissions such as cutting small diameter coppice type material, and ride edge work if the trees have not grown big. Also, you are allowed to fell up to 5 cubic mtrs of tree per quarter (every three months) without a felling licence but this doesn't get you very far in a woodland setting. You don't need permissions for non felling work such as pond restoration. In order to access most of the available woodland management grants you need an approved management plan. I hope this makes sense, it's all a little complicated. My basic advice would be to get an approved management plan if you want to do significant amounts of work within a Woodland. It's a bit of pain early on but well worth it in the long run. The 10 year plan is not set in stone, you can alter it as you go along. You can also access a grant for writing it. Nurturing a good relationship with your FC woodland officer is also time well spent.

If you have had anything to do with the forestry activities at Blean then hat's off to you. From what we saw of it, that place is thriving ecologically. If it is making ends meet financially too that is even better.

Yes, I think I probably agree with you. We are certainly not pushing to be given the designation. It's worth bearing in mind that not all woodland workers have aims and objectives that are all to the good. Sometimes Woodlands need protecting from us profit hungry distracted Apes. In some cases a SSSI designation is given because of the presence of a single protected species. The manager is then obligated to plan all management activities with the protection of this particular species in mind. To my mind this can sometimes be detrimental to the 'holistic' health of the woodland. Numerous other species can be compromised whilst trying to protect one. I am not a particular fan of 'single species conservation', that being said it is a hugely complicated discussion, with many special interest groups having very strong opinions on it. It's an important topic, and would be fun to explore in the forthcoming ecology posts on this thread.

Yes, this is pretty much the case. Being designated a SSSI woodland can be somewhat of a mixed blessing. It is a helpful extra layer of protection against bad management/development, but it can also create a frustrating amount of extra permission gaining. The SSSI tag does not necessarily totally protect irreplaceable ancient woodland habitat. Currently there are (according to the Woodland Trust) over 1000 ancient woodland sites, many of them SSSI's under threat from development projects such as HS2. I think that most of the SSSI designations were appointed quite some time ago. I don't think new ones come onto the books very often. Natural England have faced cutbacks just like every other govt. department and they just don't have the resources to do the necessary surveying. I haven't ever heard of any woodland losing it's SSSI status, but presumably this can happen under terrible management or very long term neglect.

Thanks roys, The amount of work we are doing is purely down to the specific circumstances in this Wood. It is pretty big so can easily 'soak up' large interventions, and our main focus has been the intensive job of opening it back up after decades of neglect and unfortunate plantings. It is also our day job, so need to show that things are getting done. Other Woodlands will have different requirements and a lighter touch will be more appropriate. We ourselves will soon be moving into a long lasting phase of more delicate operations, concentrating more on habitat creation and maintenance. Taking out Rhododendron is a critical exercise, and if we had lot's of it here, that's what we would be doing too.

WIDE RIDENING III. THE DIFFICULT DECISION. You may remember from way back in the thread that Steve and I had put three years into massively opening up the ride network in the Wood. This was the precursor to encouraging a three zone growth structure, going from grass, through herby and shrubby growth, to the mature trees at the back of the ride edge. All was going swimmingly, and the ride edge felling had yielded several hundred tons of firewood grade material which was the revenue stream keeping me in scotch eggs and Um Bongo. Always lurking in the back of my mind though was the thought of how difficult it was going to be to maintain the ride edge mowing regime with the thousands of stumps (some of them huge) littering both sides of the newly opened rides. Neither tractors nor mowers like stumps, and we had far too many miles of ride edge to maintain to entertain brushcutters. A tractor mounted hedging flail was a potential option but this too would have been slow and we didn't have the right equipment. Same scenario with a stump grinder. As far back as 2016 we had started to mull over the possibility of a large tracked mulcher. It was a scary prospect as this is a very big, expensive and powerful machine. It would be more than capable of dealing with our stump problem, but was it too much of a beast to unleash in an Ancient Woodland? We put the decision on the backburner, but by the Spring of this year the ride edges were beginning to grow up, the stumps were getting lost in the undergrowth and we had to decide on a course of action. I spent a long time researching mulching on sensitive sites. There wasn't a great deal of information out there. The only ancient woodland site I could find reference to at the time that had dared bring a big mulcher in was Blean Woods in Kent. Blean Wood is a stunning ancient woodland owned and managed by the RSPB. It is a SSSI (site of special scientific interest) which means it needs permission from Natural England to perform many of the standard management practices. The fact that a SSSI had decided to go down the mulching route made me a bit more relaxed about it being an option for our Wood. Raydon is not a SSSI but arguably it should be. We decided to pack up our Thermos' and travel down to Kent to see first hand what impact the ride edge mulching had had there. We were very pleasantly surprised. We took our woody friend Pete Fordham with us, as when you get as old as him you need a few nice outings. We were met at the Wood by Sam, the woodland warden for Blean. Unfortunately for him he had managed to glue his fingertips together the previous evening which made gesticulating rather difficult. The mulched ride edges within the Wood looked superb. The next picture shows the regeneration during the first growing season: The next picture shows a typical ride edge at Blean 2-3 years after mulching: The picture above is a great example of exactly the type of ride edge profile we are aiming for. You can't see them in the picture, but this strip was buzzing with Bees, Hoverflies and Butterflies. Two years previously it had all been mulched down to nothing. After a very pleasant guided stroll we left Kent with a definite sense that mulching could indeed be a very good option for us. It was going to break a few eggs at the time, but hopefully produce a hugely satisfying and ecologically interesting woody omelette in the long run. Next up. The Mulcher!

SOGGY CRISPS. In 2017 we welcomed Crispin (everyone's favourite digger driver, apart from LGP Eddie of course) back to the Wood for the next round of pond restoration. . During one of John Shipp's thinnings I had asked him to clear all the trees growing in a 15 mtr ring around each of 6 ponds located within the block. This was to give the ponds some much needed light and also in preparation for the big digger. So you can get your bearings the block in question is pictured below. Our conservation advisor Juliet had a drawn up a different prescription for each pond. Some were fully excavated, others were partially de-silted. The idea being we could monitor each pond into the future and see which prescriptions resulted in the best biodiversity gains. Crispin followed Juliet's guidance to the letter and as most of the ponds were quite small he was done in a day or two. Some people choose to pump all the water out of their ponds before embarking on this type of procedure. This is only really necessary if the pond is so large that you can't reach into the middle from the safety of the banks and you have to track the digger into the pond itself. None of our ponds were quite that big so the water was left in place. However, Crispin was nearly left rueing that decision as he came very close to a highly undesirable sludgy swim wearing a very heavy digger shaped diving suit! The picture above shows the aftermath of the rescue mission. Crispin had tracked up to the very edge of one of the ponds to reach into the centre. He had scooped up a bucket load of mush, but when he tried to lift the bucket the digger started to slide into the water. He was stuck in an unfortunate 'catch 22'. He couldn't track backwards because of the submerged bucket acting as an anchor and he couldn't lift the bucket as this slid him further into the gloop. In the end a good old Defender sorted us out. We unspooled the cable from the winch mounted on the front of Crispin's Land Rover, having first chained the Defender to a tree directly behind it. We then fed the cable through a pulley strapped to a nearby tree and attached it via another strap to the running gear of the excavator. We then took up the slack on the winch. This just about held the digger stationary whilst Crispin gently raised the submerged bucket, slewed it through 180 degrees and clawed himself out of the mire. It was all a little bum squeaky for Crispin as it was a hired in machine, but he soon regained his mojo and set about finishing the job, staying a couple of feet further back from the edge from then on! The 6 ponds have all now settled down nicely and we will see in time how the differing interventions fare in terms of increasing pond life. Below are a couple of arty winter shots taken by Steve of two of the ponds. This was after clearing the trees around them but before the digging out. Edit: Now that I think of it, two of the six ponds were not actually located inside the block highlighted on the map. I lied and I am truly sorry.?

Not at all, it's all good stuff. I'm learning just as much as you guys are.

THRILLING MILLING IV. THE LUCAS MILL. The Lucas Mill could possibly be thought of as filling a niche somewhere between the Alaskan and bandsaw mills. It is a fairly portable machine with a lightweight aluminium frame that can be set up around a log in situ. The Lucas Mill uses a pivoting circular saw blade to make it's cuts. As with Alec, it was Orchard Barn who brought the Lucas Mill to the Wood. They had made an arrangement with Greenways (a local conservation charity) which resulted in them bringing their mill to the Wood to produce some more Oak construction timbers. The Lucas Mill assembles in about 30 minutes. It can be bolted down to hardstanding or pegged down into soft ground. It can even be erected on sloping ground as the saw carrying runners can be independently adjusted to keep them parallel. This type of mill has a circular saw blade mounted below an engine. They are carried on a carriage which is pushed along runners, the blade cutting into the log as it goes. The beauty of the Lucas Mill is that the blade can be rotated 90 degrees at the pull of a lever, meaning you can cut a beam or a plank out of the log with a single up and down pass with the carriage, rotating the blade after the first pass. The cut material can then be lifted off and you are ready for the next run. You can convert a very big log into a large pile of beams or planks very quickly without ever having to manipulate the stem. The Lucas Mill is in my opinion by far your best option if you are after beams and boards. Where it is compromised is it's ability to produce wide slabs. It is limited to cutting a width equal to double the radius of the circular saw blade. That being said, you can purchase a 'slabbing' attachment. This is a hugely long chainsaw bar that runs off the mill's engine and cuts in the same way as the Alaskan mill. The Lucas Mill leaves a slightly worse finish than a bandsaw mill but you can get a 'plane' attachment which also runs off the main engine to achieve a better end result. In terms of versatility and user friendliness I would put the Lucas Mill at the top of my list, especially with the slabbing attachment, but it would depend on your own personal requirements. If you're a dedicated slab head a bandsaw mill would probably be a better bet. In terms of cost the Lucas Mill is fairly comparable to a decent entry level bandsaw mill, but vastly more expensive than an Alaskan. As mentioned previously there is a wealth of more detailed information on these mills on other Arbtalk threads. We have not yet purchased a mill of our own as we have always thought it would be too much of a distraction from our main interest (the active management of the Wood). I wouldn't however rule it out for some time in the future as it is hugely rewarding to see these 100 year old Oak stems getting converted and beginning the next useful stage in their existence.

Fantastic Mark. That sort of thing is right up my street. I hope it catches on.

Thanks nath! I'm pleasantly surprised so many of you have stayed tuned for so long!?

THRILLING MILLING III. THE ALASKAN MILL. You may remember from a previous post that my arrangement with my volunteer group (Orchard Barn) required that I provide them with timber for their various projects in return for their hard graft. One of their ongoing projects is to restore a centuries old longhouse on their site, and for this they needed some substantial Oak beams. I had some large Oak stems available from one of the early coppice compartments, the Oaks had to be thinned out in order for enough light to get through to encourage the coppice regrowth. I was once berated by one of the shooting syndicate at the Wood for deciding to take out some Oaks. His argument was that it was criminal to cut down Oak trees as they were a symbol of our all conquering naval heritage. It didn't appear to have occurred to him that our galleons would not have been much cop had the ship builders at the time decided not to fell the trees that made the boats! People can get overly emotionally attached to trees, Oaks in particular. Whilst it is true that Oaks provide unrivalled habitat services, veteran Oaks especially so, there are absolutely cases where they are best removed from a Woodland stand and processed into useable product. Much more on this in the ecology sections to come. As I was saying, Orchard Barn needed Oak beams, they couldn't afford to have them milled with the Wood-Mizer so we called in Alec (agg221 on Arbtalk) with his Alaskan and Mini-Mill set up. Alec is a flat out genius. It is my suspicion that he was born with two brains rather than just the one that is our usual quota, although I have no empirical evidence to back this up. The Alaskan mill is a very small and simple metal frame that you clamp a standard large chainsaw into. The chainsaw (often fitted with a specialised ripping chain) makes the cut whilst the frame keeps the saw at the desired depth. There is a bit more too it than this but hopefully you get the basic idea. The Alaskan Mill has the benefit of being extremely portable, with no particular need to extract the log first. On the down side it is very slow and especially tiring work. Once the Oak stems had been broken down into thick slabs with the horizontal Alaskan Mill, Alec set to with the vertically operated Mini-Mill. This device also takes a chainsaw (usually a smaller one) and can be used to section up the slabs into beams. By the end of a day's chainsaw milling we had created a respectable stack of construction beams along with some ridiculously sturdy table tops. The Alaskan mill is a good option for those on a tight budget who have very strong arms and maybe do not see milling as their full time occupation. Next up my personal favourite, the Lucas Mill.

THRILLING MILLING II. THE BANDSAW MILL. Very early on in my woodland exploits I was contacted by the International Boatbuilding Training College which is based on the Suffolk coast. I have no idea how they came by my number! They had recently resurrected their old Wood-Mizer sawmill and were scouting around for timber that they could convert into boat building materials. I had come across several windblown Oak and Ash stems in the Wood, and as it is easier to transport sawn timber than big tree trunks, we decided that it would be fun to bring their mill to the Wood for a few months to section up the stems. Sawdust Sam (as he became known) and his assistant Justin set the Wood-Mizer up on one of the open areas of concrete within the Wood. The college funded the purchase of my log arch in return for timber, and I used this to bring them their raw material. A bandsaw mill is essentially a sliding carriage composed of an engine or electric motor driven horizontal saw blade. A log is positioned on the tracks, it is then clamped in place and the saw carriage is propelled along, sawing through the log at a height set by the operator. There is much more detail on some of the excellent milling threads on this forum. The Wood-Mizer is particularly good at cutting slabs of timber, but it can also do beams and battens by turning the log through 90 degrees and re-sawing. Some bandsaws have built in hydraulic (?) assistance for turning the log. This particular machine did not, so Sam and Justin brought with them a metal gantry to assist with the heavy lifting and turning. As the mill was on site for a prolonged length of time the sawyers put up a temporary canopy to keep the elements off the sawn product. This also doubled as a makeshift pot noodle fabrication chamber. You can see the first few planks off the mill stacked at the back with little spacers between each slab to encourage a bit of air flow. By the time their stay in the Wood was up this wood store was full and Sawdust Sam and Justin could take a well earned coffee and dog petting break. I am no milling expert so these basic introductions will be short on detail, but from a woodland managers perspective it is great to see larger timber being converted into useable product. It can be a useful additional income stream as well as a way to provide material for your own construction projects. In the case of the boat building college the Oak was used for the hulls of the boats, and the less durable Ash for the interior fittings.

That is a fantastic study, thanks for putting it up. If anyone else has found any similar stuff about any woodland tree species it would be great to see them. In a few posts time I will be moving on from forestry activities to ancient woodland ecology. It might well be most appropriate to put them up when we get to this point.

I reckon it would be capable of a certain amount of 'winching in' especially if you orientated the arch to the log. It might need a few design tweaks if you were planning to do a lot of this. I'll see if I can get Tim involved in the thread to give his thoughts. Without wanting to do him out of a potential sale, you would be more than welcome to borrow the arch to see if it fits in with your operations. It just about fits on the back of a pick up, (and easily onto a trailer) if the wheels are taken off. It's been out in one of the Suffolk Wildlife Trust woods to extract some truly mighty Oak stems.

Best give him a bell I reckon. He's in a much better position to advise on the capabilities of his generic arch.

I'm sure Tim could build you a 1ton arch. He mounted the winch for me. An alternative to electric is a hand cranked ratchet type winch.

THRILLING MILLING. Much more through luck than any hint of sensible planning we have been fortunate enough to have had experience of three of the main types of mobile milling machines at the Wood. These were the Alaskan Chainsaw Mill, The Lucas type mill and a bandsaw mill. I'll give an overview of each type, but in most cases in order to mill a big tree stem you first need to transport it to a suitable milling area where there is enough space all around for a sawyer to do their thing. Quite often in Woodland a suitable stem will have fallen into a crowded environment not suitable for setting up kit. Traditionally, sizeable stems would have been extracted from the Woodland using organic horse power, these days for better or worse, (an opinion generally dependant on whether you wear a flat cap or not) we have turned to mechanical horse power ie. tractors. Even a fairly big tractor might struggle to drag a 2 ton Oak log across a stumpy forest floor, you would soon be ploughing instead of extracting. It is a big help to employ a lifting device and an extra set of wheels. This is where the log arch comes in. My log arch was designed and built by Tim at TCF Engineering, the same chap responsible for my little timber trailer from earlier posts. It is a fair bit larger than his standard model. My Arch needed to be strong enough to cope with Oak logs weighing several tons but narrow enough to fit over the slim bridge joining the two main regions of the Wood. The arch is fitted with an 8ton 12volt winch and a pulley. To use the arch you simply have to back it over the butt end of your log, feed the winch cable underneath and back onto itself, activate the winch to lift up the front end of the log and secure it in position using strops or ratchet straps. You are then good to go. This particular arch can lift a 5 mtr long log completely off the ground. Any longer than this and the log has to be skidded. The winch is powered from the tractor battery. With a log suspended in this fashion, the friction is so low that you could probably extract the timber with a grippy ride on lawnmower. Probably best not to try though. We have extracted many large Oak and Ash logs using the Arch. It is a great piece of kit: By far the best bit about having this extraction method available is that you can play Log Arch Rodeo with your woodland co-worker. This involves one person driving the tractor as fast as they dare whist the other sits atop the log clinging on for dear life as it fishtailes around all the tight corners. I have some entertaining video footage of this but unfortunately I'm too stupid to work out how to upload it. I will leave it up to your fun loving imaginations. Next up more detail on the variety of timber milling techniques.

It would be cool if one day there were plants based on this technology in every town, that tree surgeons could take their woodchip to.