the village idiot

All in good time Mick!? There's a small red clue on page 3.

The eagle eyed among you (Beau!) will have spotted a rather unorthodox cargo of stems in John's timber trailer. Next post I'll tell you what's occurring.

Cheers nepia, I couldn't agree more! I'm sure there's more out there.

SHIPPING COSTS. A few months before Steve came on board, and I was crawling through the ride edge work, the Woodland and I were delighted to welcome back the marvellous John Shipp. (He of the coppice compartment around the big pond). I had scheduled a thinning operation for a 8 hectare block of hardwoods (predominantly Ash). I did not have the necessary time or the appropriate equipment to tackle this job so I negotiated a charter of the good shipp John. As most of you will be aware a thinning operation involves removing a pre-determined percentage of the stems in a stand of trees, typically 30% or so but sometimes more, sometimes less. In most cases the objective is to give the most promising looking stems more space to grow, reducing the competition for light in the canopy and soil nutrients in the ground. My particular reason for doing the thinning was a little different. I wanted to get more light through the stand of trees to encourage the growth of the shrubby understorey to increase the viability of the habitat. The Ash stems were quite closely packed in this block and the vegetation below the canopy was looking a little sparse. This particular stand of trees had largely lost it's multi-stemmed structure so it was decided not to coppice in this instance. I was going for more of a 'continuous cover' system. A practice sometimes referred to as 'close to nature' forestry, where the canopy density is carefully and continuously managed to allow pockets of new growth to emerge without planting. This closely mimics the natural cycle of a tree dying, allowing a patch of light through the leaf cover, turbo charging the previously light supressed saplings below. John arrived with saws, digger, tractor, forwarding trailer and lunch, and got to work. He was grafting for several weeks in the blisteringly hot late Summer in full chainsaw clobber. I literally do not know how he manages this. After all the trees that I had marked up were felled and extracted we had quite an impressive stack waiting for collection. John had agreed to buy the timber standing. We agreed a price per ton of extracted product and John handled the rest. This is quite a common arrangement in Forestry. Another option would have been for me to pay John a day rate to fell and extract the timber, I would then sell the resource as cordwood (or codwood as us arbtalker's like to call it). I generally prefer to sell timber standing.

AND THEN THERE WERE TWO! With the many miles of ride network in the Wood you can probably appreciate that this process of opening them up was a very substantial task. Under the newest incarnation of the Woodland grant scheme, Countryside Stewardship (specifics to come) I had committed to creating 4.5km of three zone ride network, and the same distance of markedly narrower 'access tracks'. This had to be completed within a 5 year window alongside all the other scheduled works (coppicing, thinning, pond restoration). This target has almost been reached with a couple of years to spare. I would however have been almost certainly doomed to fail without a happy doubling of the permanent workforce. This revolutionising event occurred in 2016 when a wonderful young chap named Steve joined the party. For baffling reasons best known to himself he is still with me! Steve: (who'll be super chuffed I picked this particular picture) I met Steve whilst lodging with a family in a village close to the Wood. Steve is the husband of the daughter of my then landlord. He had grown a little disillusioned with his work as a garden designer/landscaper and wanted a change. He absolutely loves nature and bombarded me with questions about my work when we met. As it happens I had been scratching around for the previous year or so for a likeminded soul to join me in the Woods. The non-contracted out workload was far too heavy for one person. I had gratefully received a few days help here and there from a couple of people (including a few days of felling assistance from our good friend Felix the log chopper. Thank you Felix!) but they all had their own various projects on the go and couldn't join me full time. Steve started to do some volunteer days for me on his days off from the landscaping. He enjoyed the work and the environment and we got on famously, so we began to hatch a plan to enable him to come on board. The Woodland owner had in the past mentioned the possibility of apprentices so I went to the two local agricultural colleges to enquire about any relevant schemes. I shouldn't have bothered. Both colleges were totally bamboozled by my question, and there was next to no provision for a Woodlands based training scheme. (Tree Surgery- no problem). It's little wonder that such a high percentage of our Woodlands are under managed. I reported back to the Woodland owner and he decided to take Steve on regardless, as a straight employee learning on the job. After a month or so's probationary period the freshly ticketed Steve had more than proved his worth, his job was secured and we started to have lots of fun!

Yes, it has raised a few eyebrows but the response from the Forestry Commission and other Woodland boffins has been extremely positive. Apparently it is much more common for Woodland owners to tickle their ride edges, resulting in much less light getting in and much poorer biodiversity gains. Raydon is a big Woodland, it can handle large interventions. In a much smaller Woodland it might well be advisable to be a bit more conservative.

WIDE RIDENING II. Hopefully you remember from the last proper posts I was talking about the decision to take the ride edges back, up to 15mtrs each side, with a view to then encouraging the regeneration of a three zone system with a succession of increasingly mature growth regions across it's widths. Before I started the 'opening up' process pretty much all of the concrete rides looked similar to this: The non concrete grass rides were even more overgrown, with some having disappeared entirely. As with a coppice compartment, the first stage was to take out all the small shrubby growth, put aside any usable product, and stack the brash in a long line at the back. I then went back along and felled the larger trees. This resulted in significant quantities of firewood material. Once all the trees (barring a few nice feature specimens) were removed from the 30mtr width the once dark and narrow tracks were transformed into vast open corridors. You can see from the photo directly above that the thatched hut hasn't fared particularly well over the past few years. One important consideration when opening up the rides was crossing points for Dormice. Every 100 yards or so a strip of trees was left in situ, providing an aerial walkway for our canopy loving little ginger friends. Once the rides had been opened up we were still left with a rather major issue which was going to make the subsequent ride edge mowing operations rather difficult. Stumps!

Damn you Eggs. You've just short circuited my BS detector.

Hi Paul, I'm glad you are enjoying the thread. Is there a market in small plots of Woodland in Sweden or are they all hoovered up by big forestry companies? Thanks for the kind words. I hadn't really considered writing anything for any sort of publication. I have to fight a very strong urge to descend into silliness whenever I write something. It's a tendency that probably wouldn't translate too well in a more 'mainstream' arena. It's much more fun chatting with you guys as there's a lot more freedom to be daft.?

Perfect! I'll ping you a personal message tomorrow with some details.

Hi Gary, it's cool that you enjoy the detail on this kind of stuff. Once you've digested that 'requirements' document you can have a read of the update report where Juliet has revisited some of the rejuvenated ponds and dipped her net. I trust you have all brushed up on your latin! Pond restoration Raydon update 2018.pdf

Also, soon to be unveiled, a young man with a huge amount more up his sleeve than just an Owl!

You've probably been seeing all these photos with piles of wood everywhere and wondering what happens to it all. Turning this resource into saleable products is a very large and important part of the project. There will be posts coming up dedicated to firewood production, charcoal, milling etc. I promise to get to them soon!

WIDE RIDENING. PHASE 1 The first two words above are what usually fall out of my mouth automatically when I try to say Ride Widening. It's a bit of a tongue twister that I still haven't managed to crack. It's much easier to type than say out loud! The ride widening efforts actually started pretty early on, after taking the nurse conifers out of the Oaks in my first autumn. I started to cut what's referred to as scallops, basically 30mtr or so long semi circles along the track edges, alternating sides every 30mtrs. This proved to be a bit of a ball ache as when returning a year later to do the opposite sides I was causing significant damage to the new regrowth, my previous year's brash piles always got in the way and I was fairly confident that the scallops were going to be problematic when it came to the ride edge mowing regime. All of this, combined with the fact that scalloping was going to greatly limit the lines of sight for the crucial Deer stalking efforts, I opted for a different approach. I decided (for better or worse) to take all the ride edges (15mtrs each side for the 3 zone rides) back to ground level all in one hit, with the branches and tops (brash) all tucked out of the way in a line at the back. I figured that in my particular circumstances this would be a much more efficient way to proceed. I could initially get the ride edges back to 'ground zero' and then give them some curvy form with the subsequent mowing regimes. Some Woodland managers chip or burn their brash. I consider this a bit of a shame as the brash piles provide excellent cover and habitat for a wealth of Woodland critters. The UK Forestry Standards document advises that around 20% of Woodland management arisings should be left as deadwood habitat. You would be hard pressed to meet this standard, and take enough trees off site to be financially viable, if you are not leaving your brash wood in place. Cutting back the ride edges to the extent that I wanted was a mammoth undertaking. As Stere has rightly pointed out we are talking about several tens of acres of coppicing. In the first three years when I was on my own I managed to bribe a local group called Orchard Barn to come out and volunteer in return for timber materials for their various projects. Once a month a motley crew of mostly retired gentlemen would come and help with the brash dragging and log stacking. This was a big help. Traditional, natural building and greenwood working courses at Orchard Barn - practical ways to lower your carbon footprint and care for your built environment WWW.ORCHARDBARN.ORG.UK We teach Traditional and Natural Building using locally sourced natural materials

Absolutely. That's a good was to think of it. Zone 3 will need to be cut on a rotation (just like a coppice coup). Generally it will be somewhere between a 5 and 20 year rotation. Something like a 7 year rotation would give us a good return of coppice products whilst still providing a habitat whilst it is growing.

Yes! I did some of those sums and got rather alarmed when we transitioned to the current system of grant payments (Countryside Stewardship). I'll explain more about this later. I opted to settle for just under 5km of three zone rides, with the remaining half becoming narrower 2 zone or narrower still access tracks. Even with this scenario, it has been ride widening work that has used up the majority of our cutting time for the past 4 years.

RIDE EDGE MANAGEMENT. If you go for a walk around a dark under-managed Woodland you are very likely to notice that there are relatively little obvious signs of life going about it's business. Step out to the edge, where the trees meet the surrounding fields and you will probably find a very different scenario. Along a Woodland edge you often get a gradation of different sorts of growth, from the tall Woodland trees through to shrubby growth, down to maybe brambles and herby plants and ultimately down to the grass of a field or headland. This happens naturally if the Woodland edges are not flailed regularly, and if left alone totally the Woodland would gradually swell in size in all directions, always maintaining that shrubby edge at the frontier. Rest assured I am not advocating that this should be allowed to happen to all Woodland. We need crops and houses too! The point I am trying to make is that the outside edge of a dense Woodland is often it's most vibrant location in terms of biodiversity. Light is obviously the main player here. Light encourages plant growth, and a good mix of different plants brings a host of different invertebrates, reptiles, birds and mammals to feed and make homes. The logic behind widening up the rides within an area of Woodland is not just to improve access, but also to ultimately mimic the conditions at the Woodland edge resulting in wonderfully vibrant corridors of biodiversity throughout the typically quiet interior. At this Wood I opted for a three zone ride edge regime. Two zones is probably more common. The aim was to establish a 'rising' gradient of growth from the grassy main track in the middle (zone 1), through a herby layer (zone 2), to a shrubby coppice like region (zone 3), terminating in the mature trees at the very back of the ride edge. This diagram should give you an idea of the desired structure: The Woodland is fairly large so I decided to go big with the ride edges in order to create as much of these habitats as possible whilst being mindful not to turn the Wood into just a series of rides with thin strips of trees in between! Most people cut back about 4 or 5 mtrs from the central track each side. I opted for 15mtrs.? As mentioned in a previous post there are over 10km of rides within the Wood. All had large trees growing right up to the edge of Zone 1, so it was destined to be a massive project. In the next post I'll try to show you with pictures how we are getting on with this task.

There are not many more terror inducing sights than a big man in camo gear and covered face emerging quietly from the gloom of the evening trees brandishing a hefty loaded high power rifle.

Not enough cars pulling up in front of buildings, or harrowed people splashing water on their faces, gripping the sides of a sink and staring at themselves in the mirror for that! I've had to stop watching some series' because once you notice it, it just gets ridiculous.

Nice one fagus! That book is in my audiobook library waiting for a listen. A certain very important individual (soon to be revealed) has read it recently and has been telling me all about it.

He did not. One of the Deer stalking team caught him at it one evening and scared him off. He was actually helping himself from the banks of the old railway embankment, the slopes of which are actually owned by the council. We do sometimes let crafts people come and cut their own product, but we need to be able to tell them which areas to go into so they can slot in with the management objectives.

Fear not tree-fancier. I have invested heavily in comprehensive timber security measures!

Yes, lots of bats Stubby. I don't know yet what species. Juliet is planning a proper survey for next year. We are required to do a visual check for potential bat roosts before starting operations in any given area.

I think he cut his own racks, or possibly just worked his way in from one side. I can't actually remember. He did very little hand cutting. We are letting his 'straight line' harvester and forwarder wheelings tree over as they'll leave too uniform a network for an ancient woodland site if we keep them in place. We'll put a new, more sinuous track network in soon.

It is very flat Stubby. I'm totally ignorant I'm afraid on Jake's spacings. I left the operational side of the job completely up to him. He most certainly knew what he was doing, I most certainly didn't.