From Field To Woodland

It is a scary thing for me, having dreamed about a project for many years, and then suddenly, having spent a ton of money on it, being faced with committing to how that project will look over the next fifty to a hundred years.  I imagine this is how people who self build their dream home feel - you get one shot at it and you have to commit - and you live with the consequences for the remainder of your days. So, now I put it like that, my dilemma doesn't seem so bad , I have to plant some trees, it isn't the end of the world, but I still want to get it right, I want this place to look beautiful - it already does in many ways and I want to enhance that, not replace it.  I don't have the skills or experience for the job in hand really, I am learning things for sure, but I definitely need help and advise. Top of my list of advisers were the Woodland Trust. I had done a little planting with them previously in 2005 when my kids were toddlers, we sponsored and then help plant a co...

We have some new guests in the field this week.  The grass has grown rapidly in recent weeks. Sun + Rain = Long Grass! It seemed a shame to waste it, and also, long grass will make planting harder in the winter. So, what to do! The land isn't an ideal shape to have hay taken off it. The lumps and bumps that to me, give it its charm, would wreck the cutter apparently. So the next option - livestock of some description.  Cows would need access through the bottom of the field (which would mean trashing the new westerly fence) though cows would have made short work of shortening the grass. They would likely have trashed any bits of planting we have done though.  Sheep would have done the job well but don't tend to like longer grass - also I couldn't find anyone who had sheep locally.  So, it ended up being horses (Horses? Horses? Andrew Likes Horses!).  These fellows look fully grown, but , as Father Ted knows, they are actually far away! They are very young ladies,...

Our first planting back in march (see here ) was willow. Myself and Daisy, eager to plant something, cut willow stakes , thanks to a local friendly farmer and filled some of the boggy area with the stems.  We knew it was really rather late in the year to be doing this and that they might not take. Sadly we were correct. All but one look to have died.  All of the bark on the "dead" ones has turned red. I hadn't noticed this as it has happened slowly but today I noticed , one still had green bark and now has green leaves. Clearly the red colour was a bad sign. Snapping the red twigs doesn't reassure me either, they look a bit lifeless.  So, it is a learning process and we will leave the red ones in the ground just in case. If nothing happens in spring, they are easily replaced at that time.  But, the green leaves are definitely cause for celebration.  Those little shoots of life represent our first new growth and the beginnings of a woodland! A small victory, but ...

It is a funny thing with projects, you get so absorbed in them and when they are done, it is hard to imagine what things were like before you did them. A new bathroom we did at home looked beautiful after it was completed, and it was impossible to really imagine how poor it looked before hand. I always get too focussed on getting the job finished and forget to record the "before" - focussing far too much on the "after".  I was determined, given I missed the 2019 winter season for planting (thanks to incompetent Estate Agents - yes, that is you Simon Blyth in Kirkburton), that I had time to pause and document everything prior to planting in 2020. Obviously photo's are fairly easy to take from the ground and Google is a good resource for other angles, but I felt some arial footage would be useful.  My friends with hot air balloons are a little weather dependent and Covid19 has scuppered much of their flying this year but Drones work well at low heights and so I pu...

With a big pile of sleepers calling to me from the field, I decided to experiment with tarting one up - with a view to it becoming a bench one day.  The sleepers have many many years of creosote and filth embedded in them and just looking at them causes your hands to become filled with splinters. You would not want to sit on one  as it would stain and ruin even the oldest of clothes and burn / puncture you skin (creosote is unfriendly stuff).  I was advised by the sleeper supplier that a wire brush on an angle grinder cleans them up nicely , but I found this both terrifying (sparks everywhere), filthy , slow and not that successful. It left a really rough grain on the wood that would have been hard to sand out. The next suggestion was to use a circular saw to remove 3-4mm from each dimension of sleeper. This may have worked but would have sanitised them a little too much and removed a lot of character (and girth). It also proved tricky to find a joiner with a circular saw...