openspaceman

I'm sure I posted the longer version somewhen

Yes, motor manual felling was short lived, about 30 years. Like the pony express. I enjoyed doing it though.

It will be interesting to see a picture of the cut stump when it is felled if you would oblige?

I'd use a length of 6mm clear plastic fuel tube. If you make a U with water in the bottom you will probably only see a few mm difference in height if you have the leg to the flue vertical and the leg open to atmosphere at a shallow angle this will accentuate the difference. I have one that was cast out from a university lab [1] but you are a bit far from me. [1] a nice old microscope too

The fruiting bodies look like Meripilus giganteus and could be very significant. You could get a contractor to test the tree with one of the devices that sound out rot but from your description of the rotten root I think the rot is advanced. The white dots are a scale insect and ordinarily not to worry about but in this instance they may indicate a tree with lowered defences. It looks like the tree was reduced a few years ago. what was the reason? Has it lost leaves prematurely this year compared with other beeches locally?

Of course but not in hay fields. Silage I'm not sure about, whether the toxin survives the pickling

Take the plug out. The inlet is the one that opens as the piston goes down and the exhaust opens as the piston comes up as long as the engine is rotated in the right direction.

That's right, when standing and green it is unpalatable to animals but dried mixed in with forage it gets eaten.

Yes that is how they keep them in an area, I thought it was a sound that they associated with the shock but don't know.

I was told similar about ragwort, that it was more significant in breeding cattle and horses because it took longer to have effect.

It is and most cattle won't eat it, which is why the trampling was referred to. There were liver cancers found after people had been eating it in Japan and even Wales during WW2 IIRC.

whitebeam

Maybe Rigidoporus ulmarius

I cannot help with a company that refurbishes carburetors; it would be interesting to see what causes them to fail beyond needle valves, diaphragms and pumps, all of which are replaceable. For my part I have seen worn butterfly spindles/holes, throttle pumps and check valves cause air leaks that stop the engine running with either weak mixture or failing to draw fuel.

There's no choke because the primer bulb squirts petrol in the intake to richen it. When you press thebulb your finger covers the hole that allows fuel to drain back when running. The screw at the bottom of the float chamber is just a drain. I think the silver screw opens the butterfly to increase tickover revs. The other is probably the slow running mixture.

Yes I used to swap every year, now it's an addition to car insurance.

yes there's a dilemma in that during the nesting season if you have enough cattle to trample the bracken you increase the chances of trampling eggs I suppose. The nesting season is the only opportunity to cut and collect the bracken.

Galloways have been used on all of Surrey Wildlife trusts sites for about 20 years and there are about half a dozen on the site in question. They don't seem to have much effect on bracken. The are using the gps neck collars on their Chobham common reserve which is much bigger.

I do much the same but you need to be aware that if the cord is too thin it can spool on side by side rather than on top of the previous layer and when you pull it to start it wedges the plastic pulley apart.

Big problem which we have discussed here before, Asulox, the selective herbicide that was used is not licensensed anymore, glyphosate works but only in full leaf around August. Dicamba which had a specific application method, that was not often adhered to, is not licensed.It was applied in winter and was particularly effective but needed a summer follow up spot weeding with glyphosate. Cultural methods work and cut and cart three times in the summer probably the best where it is a monoculture. As I said the site is an SPA so no intervention in the nesting season is allowed. This is daft because it is spreading and nothing of interest nests under it. If it is cut for 3 years ( in the growing season but off the SPA) the re establishment of heathers is good, tussock grass on the more fertile bits. The thing is the SPA has three indicator birds that they judge the health of the heath by ( although it is a proxy as the insects and reptile/amphibians are a major interest). Dartford warblers nest in gorse so are relatively unaffected by cutting, Woodlarks will prefer the short sward produced by this recent mowing, the nightjars, which arrive in April and gone by September, will nest in the more mature heather and grass. There should be a scheme of cutting and hand roguing blocks while the nightjars have the rest of the , relativity, unaffected heather. Nightjar population is growing thanks to the reversion from plantation/woodlands on these sites generally plus asking owners to keep their dogs to major paths in the nesting season probably has an effect.

It's an interesting question, I no longer have dealings with the landowner but was told they would be bonfired off site. I was flabbergasted. I suggested there were green composting alternatives locally but thought I knew a tip site (from here)that might take them if they would like me to enquire. I have been told by a local that they felt I was criticising.Anyway after a few exchanges with @Woodwanter on here he was willing to take a punt but was worried about the moisture content. By the time I had got back and asked whether they could load them they said they had instructed their contractor to dispose the bales to a green waste site. I have asked for the contractor to contact me but they are no longer answering my email. Heavy rain today won't have helped.

There is an old saying which indirectly tells about soil fertility. " Gold under gorse Bronze under bracken hunger under heather" so heather grows where the fertility is low, it has a way of locking all the available nitrogen into the plant. Bracken thrives where there is a bit of potassium, I often notice it along one of the trees we left as standing dead when it has fallen down and started to rot. Gorse grows where there is available potassium and Phosphorus and can make its own nitrogen as it is a legume. It's more nuanced than that in reality as there are lots of other things that influence but the old farmers knew a bit. Heath developed where much of the available minerals for growth had walked off the site into the farmers adjacent fields after a bit of free grazing.

I said there was a story behind this picture The heath is a remnant of a larger common that has mostly become developed as the commuter town of Woking was built up. This part to the north of the town is a large open space of over 800 acres. Grazing had largely ceased in Victorian times but it remained a "blasted heath" because of it's sandy soil with leached out fertility. When I was a boy the military still had a lease on the land from WW2 and their antics plus hordes of recreational horse riders and the occasional wild fire had kept it largely devoid of trees. From 1974 I had fallen into forestry work and was an avid member of RFS. At one meeting on Wisley and Chatley heath commons the forester for SCC (the owners there) told us that he was planting up that heath with mostly lodgepole pine. Now by then I had planted lodgepole pine and never seen any that looked likely to produce decent timber, I was also aware that heath, which is mainly man made by over grazing, was becoming a rare habitat. So I spoke up that it should be maintained as heath and not afforested, I was told that was ridiculous and as a major timber importer it was important to have our own timber production. It got planted both sides of the then single carriageway A3 with separated the two blocks, lodgepole and Tsuga to the north . Now 50 years later the A3 dual carriageway is widened to 8 lanes and a green heathland bridge has been erected to link the two heaths, the planted trees have been long gone (and all that planting grant money wasted) as the Thames Basin Heaths project has taken off to preserve heath. Having lost my forestry trainee job after a house move I went back to learn a bit more about dairy farming and volunteered on a decrepit farm with a 72 year old chap and his herdsmen, about this time I met @Deafhead. The farm was bought and subsequently developed into a golf course. By then I had been head hunted by a new IH dealership as a tractor salesman. Here I tinkered with tractors, met a number of local farmers, one the grandfather of a garrulous member here who politely told me not to return, and gradually twigged not only was I a useless salesman but the business was only a front for getting the owner's money out of Zimbabwe. I was sacked. I went back to climbing for one of the major local tree firms, the boss was good but wages and conditions poor so that didn't last, I moved into managing another smaller firm with just two gangs. The owner, a chap of about 40 on his second or third marriage , his manager have run off with his previous wife, came in one morning to complain that his new wife wasn't happy with me and that I had berated an employee for having sharpened his saw below the rakers. Given the ultimatum to apologise or go I was off. I bought some birch for turnery poles and with a college mate we went into the timber felling business. Now to the gist of the story, while a tractor salesman I had met a printer who ran a small holding with liveries and was the part time manager of this common to the north of Woking. Since the army had left 15 years earlier a large number of self seeded scots pine had taken advantage of the nitrogen from car exhausts and coupled with the aid of mycorrhizal fungi extracting potassium and phosphorus from the grains of silica the whole place was becoming a low yield secondary woodland. The bit in the photo was still heath with little to no bracken but the area just beyond was thicket stage pine. Again the proposal was to plough and plant , corsican pine this time. I approached the new owners and suggested this was a bad thing, I still have the wordy letter I sent to explain. I bought some birch thinning from them and worked for them, on a self funding basis for 30 years. Then came the drought of 76 and the wildfire that burned a hundred or more acres, devastated the reptile and probably ground nesting bird population but killed the trees. After looking at the eyesore of standing dead trees the owners agreed to let me clear the land. I worked with a sawmill tidying up after their big hardwood fellers had taken the timber and , for speed as we were often on shooting estates, burned all the small roundwood and tops. So I got the chap that did this with his Cat 977 to rake up and burn the scorched trees, the mound of ash is still there as a clump of gorse. The heahter is good but over mature now and could do with swaling blocks. I think the disturbance of the soil profile was a bad thing, but I was young. The area largely returned as heather in the bit we raked but the potassium from burned trees mean that bracken started encroaching from one roadside. If left un managed it will out compete the heather and take over, much as it has on the Wisley common. A management problem is that all these Thames Basin Heaths have upgrades from SSSIs to SPAs in the 90s, which makes management stupidly restrictive, to the benefit of bracken and the overall loss of heather. The bit where the tractor is working was never heavily treed but was becoming so, it was a wet area in winter with a large number of informal borrow pits. These are difficult to work and have been mostly left to develop as secondary woodland, pine, birch aspen and willow. For some dubious reason rather than cut and carry off the over growth on the machine manageable areas the decision was made to screef off the surface. The arisings were dumped in a field that had developed from 1972 to wood pasture with glorious displays of orchds and that was the end of them. The screefed area is what you see some 10 years later where he exposed layer favoured gorse, finally, where the mower and baler could get, they are taking off the arisings. Over time this lowered surface fertility should favour heather ( ling, crossleaved and bell) as long as bracken is controlled. Strips of gorse have developed alongside paths throughout as the roots partake of phosphorus from dog crap.

Yes our first year of wildfires, the heath was ablaze both sides of the road to the hospital so I had to use the back roads to see my younger daughter who had just been born. There's a story linked to that photo of the gorse being baled on the heath I recently posted.

Yep and one bit me this summer too.