Thursday 10 April 2008

Burning, burning

Every time we think we're just going to the wood for an evening walk around to take some pictures, we end up doing a job! And getting non-woodland clothes dirty....

This time the job was burning - we found that the embers from Tim's fire from burning up the oak brash were still very hot (yes, from Tuesday!), so we couldn't resist turning in the stuff around the edge that hadn't burned:
We saved some of the chunkier bits to build our piles of oak to rot down for wildlife, but there was also a lot more twiggy stuff lying around near the fire, so we added that too, and within 20 minutes it was raging:
We also saw something Tim had told me when I popped up on Tuesday - a neat way of holding a stack of logs together. What you do is lay two big logs down as rails, and use a chainsaw to bore vertical holes into the end of them. Then you stick some smaller logs into thhose holes, so they stand up straight and hold the pile together. The advantages - no need to sharpen the posts, no need to use a hammer to drive them into the ground, and the whole thing can be picked up as a unit by a tractor by putting chains round it. Here's what it looks like:
Going back down the wayleave to the car we saw loads of blue tits around, we saw a male pheasant earlier too - Tracy nearly jumped out of her skin when she disturbed it while it was poking around our base in the wood. Here's a picture of one the blue tits:
Mike

2 comments:

Garden Crew said...

not to be a stick in the mud, but is it really safe to leave burning embers out on your forest land for a couple days? I guess it's the wet season (from the ruts that your tractor is leaving) so it's probably not a big deal right now, but when the dry season rolls around?

Mike Pepler said...

We used to put the fire out, but I was advised by a forester that it's OK to leave it burning, certainly when everything's damp, as it is now.

In the summer we'll put it out, as I guess there will be a higher risk then.

Mike