marktownend

25 miles as the crow flies. 37 miles by road. 55 minutes depending on vehicle and traffic.

Came across this on a walk in the New Forest a couple of weeks ago. This was about 5 feet tall on a pretty decent sized beech, really impressive growth even without it happening to look like an ugly face.

Oh dear, I've just lost half an hour looking at his creations, some chap called Keith Pettit, good stuff o his website and instagram.

Personally I'd love to see it just left as it is if there isn't any public access or risk to livestock. Would be amazing to watch it gradually return to the soil over the next few decades. However, depending on what the field is used for or how it would fit aesthetically with the location (it looks like estate land) this may not work. And whether you want to maximise financial return is another question. As other posters have said, the tree could be dealt with and the area cleared up relatively easily by someone with the right knowhow and equipment. It could be used for art projects in situ, removed and made into 1000 chopping boards, burnt, hollowed out into a huge canoe, any number of uses but you'll never get a concensus of opinion on here and ultimately it'll depend on what the owner thinks best as to what happens to it. If it's not creating a danger as it is then maybe leave it for a few months for discussion and contemplation time as it won't be going anywhere. A neighbour in our woods had a big ash tree that had fallen before he bought the plot and fairly quickly had it chopped up for boards and firewood and I know he has pangs of regret about that and wonders if he should have left it.

I've got 4 small rowan saplings growing in pots that came up from seeds I was sent by an elderly aunt in autumn 2022, seem to remember I just squished them and chucked them in the pots but may have separated the seeds. I've not given them much care, those that came up grew remarkably little in the first year then I lost a few over the winter and the 4 survivors grew quickly at the start of spring this year but are still quite weedy, only about 30cm tall. But they definitely didn't go through a bird so no magic acid needed. Need to decide whether to risk keeping them in pots another year or just to plant them out this autumn/winter and let them fend for themselves.

I did a few days labouring in a local sawmill during Covid and seem to remember someone saying they'd use any offcuts from milling larger timber to produce pallet wood although I think the days I was there we were just putting the flitches into a stillage to be cut for firewood.

Yep, here's one I saw in the Atlas Mountains in Morocco in 2015. It was on it's way down off a plateau towards a gorge with some lovely tight steep wiggly bends but must have made it as we weren't held up on our way back down.

Which country are they in? One of my pet hates on forums is people not giving their location, so you could be in Ecuador for all I know, and I know even less about the timber market there than I do about the UK market. Personally the only slabs I've sold went directly to a furniture maker I already knew.

Yep, it came with the rails (well, 5 of them). Annoyingly 4 of them were attached to a lovely straight looking bit of timber, but we had to unscrew them as there was no way that was going to fit in my MX5 that I'd taken to collect it! I'll attach them to the straightest thing I can find. I like the candle wax tip!

Just to stop everyone pestering the OP in the future, I picked this up from him today to have a play with.

Think you're meant to remove the protective plastic covering from the camera lens before taking the photos. That's a large quantity to start shifting to individuals via Facebook or whatever, I'd guess you might need to be looking to sell them wholesale to a timber company who can then retail them, but they've generally got their own sources and quality control. Someone like English Woodlands Timber in Sussex, but probably closer to you.

Mick, not sure 40 mins x 5 make 2 hours. Bombadil, thanks for the reminder about Bovril, I love a hot Bovril on a cold day. Agree about Earl Grey and similar, always a dreadful surprise. I do lighting for events rather than arb work and work at some quite nice private places for some quite well to do folk. Generally we're looked after really well (had a couple of bottles of very nice champagne left on the seat of the van whilst setting up a job this summer, not even afterwards!) and had the best steak of my life provided by the caterers running from a temporary kitchen in a marquee in someone's garden, but I did one very nice party (working right through the night) and the lady told us she'd cooked us some food and to go and help ourselves in the kitchen. Well I'm really not fussy but even I found it totally inedible. Never had food like it. Some uber-cheap supermarket lasagne that she'd somehow killed. Our problem then bacame what to do with it, we couldn't leave it, couldn't put it in her bin where she'd find it, couldn't feed 2 portions to the small dog as it would have ended up as dead as the lasagne, I ended up finding a carrier bag in the van and having to take it home for disposal. And the main event caterer would happily have fed us if she'd been asked in advance. I'm scarred from the experience. The builders currently putting up an extension for us at home seemed very surprised to find they get decent coffee here. And proper builders tea.

I do some conservation volunteering in woods near home which includes coppicing hazel that was put back into a 7 year rotation 9 years ago, so we're on the second cut. A local chap who also coppices himself takes some of the product to use for spars and seems to get decent commercial orders for them, I believe he's got one thatcher who travels from Norfolk to Wiltshire to collect them but no idea on pricing. They need to be processed relatively soon after cutting and I think the thatchers also want them fairly fresh to maintain their pliability.

Well it's suspiciously similar to these which I noticed in our garden earlier, about 2 feet from our sorry looking apple tree that had a growth right at the base a couple of years ago that I thought was honey fungus.

Indeed, we've had our woodland for just over 2 years and have had my mum and an aunt, both in their early 80s visit and both were spotting all sorts of things I knew nothing about, just because people in general knew more about nature and the countyside even as recently as their childhoods in the 1940s. I thought from the first photo it looked very like a spot near Castle Drogo so was chuffed when I saw the finger post in the 2nd pic pointing towards Castle Drogo. Think I had the wrong spot though. Am I right in saying that an assart hedge is a hedge specifically formed by leaving a thin strip on the edge of a woodland when it was cleared? Think I've read about that in one of my woodland books. Presumably if you're needing a field boundary for stock enclosure or whatever then it would have made sense to leave some existing trees (presumably supplemented with some traditional hedge laying) rather than grubbing the whole lot out and starting from scratch as you'd have a functioning hedge sooner.