The avantgardener

What about getting someone to turn a load of wooden mugs in different species to show off the timbers, keeps warm, doesn’t get too hot to hold. Apparently the Romans turned wine vessels out of large Ivy stems, really thin walled and waterproof.

The huge knuckles and included unions should produce some interesting stuff too, It was standing in the grounds of a large private school, hopefully it should be free of iron.

It’s a Spencer timber tape used in felling for linear measuring of sawlogs/bars etc, imperial one side, metric the other. The butt has a 1.5m diameter and 2.5m long, it must have been an impressive Oak when it was standing.

That looks clean. I looked at a good lump today also, they want it milled into various benches/tables situated around the school, the big collections of knuckles and branch unions interest me more though.

I can’t remember off hand, will dig it out when I get back home, I am working away.

I took mine back with the same issue after a couple of days, the dealer gave me a new one and told me to keep the other, I swapped the ear defenders off my old Husqvarna Balance helmet and the problem stopped. Ended up with a Protos when I needed to replace them, expensive but definitely the best helmet on the market, my Husqvarna one is now used for strimming in the garden, feels really flimsy on now.

But not European. Holly, Black Locust then Hornbeam if I remember the chart right. No Yew, Fruit Wood or Hawthorn on this chart though, I would think any of these last three would be right up there.

Holly is higher. I have a chart in a book but I am working away so can’t post it till next week.

It’s usually a signifier of declining health/vigour. Has the tree had any major work done in the past, root damage/compaction etc? I would take a more detailed inspection and assess its overall condition. The fungi can colonise pretty rapidly so may be pathogenic.

It looks like Flammulina velutipes (velvet shank) rather than honey fungus.

This is one of the old glass houses at Hadlow College, I walked in there on a pretty dull February day, i gave me that feeling you get when you get off the plane somewhere tropical.

I had to clear up a hell of a mess made by a paintball group who had been using a section of woodland near me, barricades, trenches, the lot. There is a guy near me who has a coppice rotation producing biochar, he chips the wood before putting it into a series of kilns, they are linked so they draw off heat from one to the next, he adds all kinds of organic material to produce a high grade soil improver with a good retail price. He has also created burial plots under all the large Oak standards, “Family Trees” where the whole family can be buried, easy to find in the woods as they all have a GPS location. There was also a farmer near Brighton who did something similar, test drilled for minerals etc, applied for planning for affordable housing, all came to nothing so he mapped out a whole load of burial plots then sold them for a fixed price including a tree, basically sold the land for ten times the going rate and created a woodland. If the soil type is viable you could plant Hazel with rootstocks impregnated with Truffle, the British stuff is not rated as highly as the French ones but are still a good return within 5 years. Combine this with bushcraft, greenwood working and forest school access and it might have legs, not sure how you would fit it all in around the day job though?

A slight but not total derail. I was chatting recently to a guy about a venture in the West Country that can loosely be described as a ‘Wood Bank’. It started out as a group of volunteers working an unmanaged Woodland, some of the firewood created was delivered to isolated homes in the area owned by pensioners to help them through the Winter. Turns out, a lot of these properties also have unmanaged woodlands attached to them, these are now back in rotation, surplus wood being generated is being moved on to other homes and the cycle continues. They have even received grant funding for chainsaw certification and now number over 40. Great thread this, its like reading a good book.

Why don’t you do a week cutting and count up the product you cut/make and then work out what the day rate versus piece rate is? I have been cutting for 26 years, just about done everything except cutting for skyline. Cutting sweet chestnut when you are making several products is the most labour intensive discipline that I have done. Money can be earned, but your body won’t like you.

Looks like Cupressus sempervirens

No, it makes you a person with impeccable taste.

If you not working on a site that has signed up to the FISA you do not need compulsory refreshers, it is still only advisory but would look good to your insurance/HSE in the event of an accident. If your working on any site that has signed up to FISA such as the FC or for Tilhill/Euroforest, you will need a refresher. This must be done by a FISA instructor or a LANTRA +F Instructor. You can do a more advanced ticket and this will refresh the previous ones, however, I think in some cases this is bollocks. If I do my CS38, how does this refresh my CS31 felling ticket? If you need a refresher to be compliant and not limit your access to some work sites then I would look at what you do the least, not most, as this would probably be where you might find weaknesses. End if the day, get a suitable instructor to come to your work site, you might or might not learn something, your then covered for 5 years, for one day of training, it’s not going to put you a month behind your schedule or cost an arm and a leg.

Bag of shite.

The Woodland Trust do open days down near me and get a horse logger in to do extraction demos, lots of photo opportunities and good donations are raised.

The difference between your Sprinter and J’s is , his doesn’t run out of diesel in the rain. ?

Combine this fact with another, Forestry England who manage vast amounts of the UK’s Woodlands have made losses and been subsidised by the tax payer for three decades.

So if we are not importing cheap labour we are importing timber that has been sourced elsewhere using cheap labour.

There is a mountain of chip regularly at the docks at Shoreham, near Brighton, god knows where that’s imported from. Wasn’t it the war criminal Tory Blair that changed the legislation surrounding illegally felled timber so that we could import it? And we import more timber than any other EU country I was led to believe.

The majority of trees and plants you see in nursery’s all over the UK are imported, it’s been like this for decades. The kiln dry wood from the Baltic states is cheap, so better margins, who cares about the working conditions of the cutters and welfare of European Forests, right? It is not coincidental that the huge Black Hole of Kent which is the Sandwich Bio Mass plant is situated on the Thames, direct cheap Baltic imports from day one.

I felled around 500 tons of Ash on a thinning job in East Sussex around two years ago, only one tree had seeds on in the entire block. Natural England agreed to clear fell the Ash on the entire site this year due to the speed of the advanced decline, the worst I have seen anywhere else, very sad to see but nature doesn’t like a vacuum, it’s place will be filled by other genus for now, apart from the odd spectacular resilient tree that literally blows your mind, like the first time that I saw the Elm surrounding The Level in Brighton.