tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16581293151260343862024-03-18T20:01:04.311-07:00Tales From Fox WoodJason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.comBlogger16125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-66283252104918361942016-07-20T05:40:00.001-07:002017-10-16T12:39:14.264-07:00Forest Gardening and the Five F's<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Learning all about forest gardening with Martin Crawford</td></tr>
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In the last post I mentioned that I had been busy putting up a lot of wire mesh fencing to keep rabbits out of a portion of Fox Wood. The reason for doing so was because I have set aside about half an acre to create a forest garden. My enthusiasm for undertaking such a project was being driven by the fact that I had just returned from a three-day course on forest gardening, run by the renowned Martin Crawford (author of <i>Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to grow Edible Crops</i>) at the Darlington Estate, an hour and a half's drive from here near Totnes, Devon. The course was really worth the money and I got to meet lots of people from all over the world who were keen on growing their own forest gardens (FGs), as well as getting the chance to test Martin Crawford's patience with a relentless flow of questions, not all of them stupid.<br />
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And so, I returned (after two nights spent sleeping in an AirBnB shed in someone's garden) full of plans for creating a forest garden at Fox Wood. I had planned to splurge out the details of it on this blog in one go but when I actually sat down to write about it I saw that instead of just diving into the mossy green waters of forest gardening it was going to have to be split into three parts. The first part - this one - will be a survey of what a forest garden is, why we would want to grow such a thing and what benefits it offers. The second part will set out the design process and the various factors, system boundaries and unknowns I had to consider when planning the Fox Wood Forest Garden. In the third part I'll take you on a tour of what I have planted so far and show you lots of nice pictures.<br />
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So, backing up a bit, what is a forest garden? Well, before we go any further, and just to get some terminology out of the way, in America forest gardens are sometimes called food forests. This should give you a pretty good idea of what they are. They are forests where you grow food. But food forests or forest gardens still sounds a bit too namby pamby for some (especially those already involved in agriculture or those who are seeking grants) and so a further term 'agroforestry project' has been introduced. Agroforestry sounds a bit more like something you could make money from and so this is the term that most officials are happy with if one ever has to explain what one is doing to someone with a clipboard.<br />
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For the purposes of this blog, however, I'll be calling them forest gardens. Everyone likes forests, don't they, and everyone likes gardens, so put the two together and you've got something that makes people go a little bit gooey at the mere mention of it.<br />
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Anyway, forest gardens go back a long way. Before the dawn of agriculture we humans had been gathering and hunting in forests and relying on this type of ecosystem for our sustenance. Everything we needed was right there in the forests, ranging from food (obviously), to materials, tools and even spiritual sustenance. Many forest-dwelling indigenous tribes still in existence do exactly the same thing and for them the forest is the mother that sustains them; without it they would die. Clearly though, for those of us who have signed up for the great roller coaster ride we call 'civilisation', living in a forest and thinking of it as our mother is not something we would readily subscribe to. Most of the land on which we live has been given over to agriculture and infrastructure. Some of the unproductive bits have been left as nature reserves, but not many people live in them.<br />
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And yet, if we (in the temperate zones) were to abandon a field or a village or even a car park, it would turn into a forest relatively quickly. Becoming a forest is what the land <i>wants</i> to do, because that is its natural state. But if we look around we will see that most of the land isn't in this state because we keep it developed in a way we consider beneficial to us. To use an example close to home, Fox Wood is surrounded by fields that belong to agricultural companies. In these fields are grown annual crops - cabbages, cauliflowers, daffodils, potatoes - and all other plants are excluded to allow these crops to grow. It is common to see large pieces of agricultural machinery lumbering across these fields, harvesting and sowing, spraying herbicides and pesticides, or ploughing the soil. All in all it takes a massive amount of effort and energy to keep the land in this state of arrested development and suitable for the growing of annual crops.<br />
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Forest gardening turns this entire concept on its head because it is a method of working <i>with</i> the land rather than against it. In a way there exists a kind of symbiosis between the land and the forest gardener. The deal is that the land is allowed to turn itself into a forest, but only on the condition that we are allowed to design some aspects of it. We get to decide which trees, bushes, vines and perennials grow there - to a large extent - making it an unnatural system, but not as unnatural as a field of wheat or a plantation of soya. It's a method of cooperation that works very well and we can expect a forest garden to produce for us the '<b>Five F's</b>' in the form of a range of <b>food</b> (fruits and nuts, leaves and berries, mushrooms and meat and perennial vegetables), as well as <b>fibres</b>, <b>fuel, </b><b>fulfilment and farmacy</b>. Yes, I know pharmacy doesn't begin with an 'f' but it's a bit of artistic license. It will do all of this with minimum inputs of time and energy, if the design is done well enough. Proof of this is in the picture below:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: #6a6a6a; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-align: left;">Robert</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: left;"> Adrian </span><span style="color: #6a6a6a; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-align: left;">de</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: left;"> Jauralde </span><span style="color: #6a6a6a; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-weight: bold; text-align: left;">Hart</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: x-small; text-align: left;"> (1 April 1913 – 7 March 2000) was the pioneer of forest gardening in temperate zones.</span></td></tr>
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Robert Hart was considered the original pioneer of forest gardening in the UK. Having studied forest gardening techniques in the Far East (where the concept never really went away) he developed his own FG in Shropshire and managed it using simple tools amounting to no more than a saw, some pruning shears, a spade and some secateurs. No heavy machinery, chemicals or petroleum were needed to adequately grown enough food and fuel for himself and his brother from his small plot of land.<br />
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Robert Hart may have been the first to plant a FG in the UK, but nowadays there are some 2,000 in existence across the country, ranging from tiny plots of land in back yards, to field-sized woodland packed with productive species. It's amazing how the concept of forest gardening has risen up in this time.<br />
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Aside from the basic principle of allowing the land to return to a semi-wild and bounteous state (and then piggy-backing on its productivity) another key concept to take on board is that of recognising and using the different layers contained therein. Within a FG there are several layers which, taken from the top going down, comprise the canopy formed by large trees, vines, smaller trees (including fruit trees), bushes, perennial vegetables, herbs and (below ground) the fungal layer. Each layer, apart from the fungal, is able to effectively harvest light due to way the garden is designed, with larger trees in the middle or to the north (in the northern hemisphere), and smaller plants staged beneath to maximise exposure. It's a very effective 3D way of using sunlight to the max and a mature FG should require very little maintenance. Contrast this once again with the annual crop system - which only has one layer - and the latter starts to look less and less efficient, which begs the question ...<br />
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If forest gardens are a more efficient way of producing food then why do scientists, governments and corporations pour so much money and resources into producing monocultures of staples?<br />
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That question can be answered with one word: complexity.<br />
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Forest gardens are semi-wild ecosystems, and like any ecosystem it is going to be tremendously complex. There are likely to be many variations in how plants grow in a FG depending on, amongst other things, altitude, wind exposure, geographical location, proximate plantings, mycorrhizal interaction (the local fungal network) ... and a host of other factors. Scientists don't like complexity. They like things that can be measured and held constant while one or two variables are adjusted. They don't like having thousands or even millions of variables because it hinders their ability to test hypotheses and that is not in the nature of reductive science. It is far easier (while abundant fossil energy supplies last) to eliminate as many variables as possible by reducing biodiversity and then measure the results of using different sprays and gene sequences or whatever. But it's also the least sustainable way of doing things and the way that damages the biosphere the most.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An illustration of the different productive layers in a forest garden (not showing the underground fungal layer)</td></tr>
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Complexity aside, there's another reason why forest gardening attracts virtually no scientific interest compared to - say - genetically modified rice, and that's money. Imagine if the UK had not 2,000 forest gardens, but 20 million. Imagine if most people, instead of driving to Tesco in their cars, went into their own back yards and cooked up dishes such as organic nut-reared free-range squirrel wrapped in banana leaves and stewed in home grown red wine with shiitake mushrooms with herbs. Not only would people be a lot more healthy but biodiversity levels would rebound, carbon emissions would be slashed, unemployment would disappear and everyone's happiness levels would increase. This, of course, would be disastrous for the economy and GDP would crash through the floor. Where's the money in that? People will say such a food production scenario is unrealistic, but then so is modern farming, which is burning up natural capital faster than it can be replaced. Forest gardening cannot 'feed the world' overnight, but it can certainly feed a lot more people than petroleum based agriculture - and in the long term it may be our only option.<br />
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Anyway, I digress.<br />
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So, forest gardens (FGs) are a way of working with nature that provides ample food and other products for local people and communities. They are necessarily small scale in nature because of the relatively high level of manual labour involved, at least in the early years, and the limited amount of land available to families and communities. They can be seen as complex ecosystems that make use of the available resources and are endlessly regenerative. They build soil, thus sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, and reduce reliance on long supply chains in the process. Is there anything they are no good at? Yes, as a matter of fact, there is. FGs are not particularly good environments in which to grow crops that are high in carbohydrates. Light-loving crops such as potatoes will not do well in a FG unless a space is set aside for them where they can soak up the rays without interference from overhanging boughs or shade tolerant perennials. That's not to say that it is impossible to come by carbohydrates as there are some excellent alternatives - such as sweet chestnuts - but generally speaking annual carb crops don't grow very well in a forest environment. Which may be why we have evolved to not eat too many carbs in the first place.<br />
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There is another important factor to consider with forest gardens and that is they are resilient with a capital R. The weather and the future will no doubt be throwing plenty of spanners into the works of the world's food supply. Global weirding is already giving us extremes and we can all expect this to get worse as weather systems become more disrupted and unstable over time. In this light, relying on delicate monocultures for our food is likely to be disastrous. Pests, for example, just love the way their favourite foods are laid out mile after mile in neat rows. Hurricanes can flatten crops in minutes and floods will wash over-ploughed topsoil away just as easily. Forest gardens, by contrast, utilise maximum diversity for security. By growing a couple of hundred different types of food intensively in a compact setting, the forest gardener can afford to relax a little when contemplating heatwaves, floods, pest epidemics, big freezes and hurricanes. Of course, they're not immune to meteor strikes, nuclear war or invading aliens - but what is? But whatever the weather flings at the forest gardener's hyper-diverse little patch of paradise it will likely only affect a portion of her production, and even then only temporarily until the damage heals. By contrast, the farmer next door with his three fields of wheat may well spend the wee hours worrying about the future. If forest gardening were to have a slogan it might be: <i>Resilience in Diversity</i>. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A monoculture devastated by drought</td></tr>
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Which gets me back to the reason for wanting to plant a FG at Fox Wood. By zoning off a portion of the coppice woodland and fencing it for protection against 'pests' (in my case rabbits) I'm aiming to create a system that will produce the Five F's long into the future (there's another important F). Mine will be a little unusual in that there's already a forest in place. Most FGs start with a patch of bare grass or a back garden, but I'm aiming to integrate coppice woodland management into the Fox Wood FG. This, so far, seems to be a good idea. By cutting the maidens (uncoppiced young trees) I have instantly created a space that has very few ground perennials or annuals growing on it, thus giving me a head start to place my own favoured species. The coppiced trees will be kept on a short cycle of cutting - say every three years - to prevent the regrowth from shading out the perennials. And here they are - a few of my pioneer species arriving in a cardboard box from a nursery in Wales.<br />
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In the next post I'll talk a bit about the design process and the factors I have had to consider when creating a forest garden at Fox Wood.<br />
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-56621451628038502822016-05-27T13:39:00.000-07:002016-05-27T13:53:33.510-07:00Root and Branch Thinking<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Well, spring is rapidly turning into summer here in west Cornwall and everything is flowering, growing leaves and shooting upwards as the race begins to grab as much sunlight as possible in the months ahead. Native bluebells carpet the woods and ferns are unfurling their tender shoots to reveal the delicate lacework beauty of their fronds. Bird song can be heard everywhere and the forest is all atwitter as they flit among the trees searching for food to feed their chicks. Foxes prowl, ducks sit of the pond and buzzards hover overhead on the lookout for baby rabbits. Everything is as it should be for this time of year.<br />
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I took the picture above yesterday as I was finishing off putting up 300m of rabbit-proof fencing. This old but not particularly big oak is probably my favourite tree in the whole seven acres of woodland. Originally a boundary tree atop a long-since collapsed Cornish hedge (i.e. a dry stone wall) the tree will have been here long before the surrounding woodland. In case you are new to this blog or just need a reminder, the woodland it an exceptionally young one, the eldest of the plantation trees having only been planted around 25-27 years ago. The land used to belong to the local stately home but was sold off in parcels in order to (unsuccessfully) stave off bankruptcy. Locals tell me that after a particularly scary tractor accident in which the gentleman farmer lost control and ended up in the brook at the bottom of the valley, it was decided to turn the steep section of land into a chestnut and oak coppice. What they planned to do with the resulting wood products is anyone's guess as cheap imported wood easily outcompetes the native variety, but they decided to plant it up anyway. Perhaps they were looking ahead to times when locally grown coppice products would be restored to their rightful place, or maybe they were just experimenting - who knows. Anyway, back when it was just fields of sheep and cows, the tree above would have stood proud in the hedge. Its prominent position meant it would have received the full blast of the southwesterly winds, which is why it is shaped as though it is bending backwards, but at least there wouldn't have been anything with which to compete for the light.<br />
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But disaster befell the poor tree when the land around it was abandoned to scrub and within a couple of decades it found itself choked by ivy and with the sun blocked out by a large goat willow that had seeded next to it. Hawthorn, too, grew up around it, and when I bought the land three years ago it was clearly on its last legs - I mean trunk. This was it a couple of years ago - struggling for light and growing ever more contorted twiggy branches to reach above the canopy.<br />
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So, anyway, I coppiced the neighbouring willow last winter, using the logs for mushrooms and firewood. It has already begun to grow back and there is now a sizeable forest clearing for light to get in. I also removed one of the hawthorns and trimmed back a holly, and now the tree - free of ivy as well - is bursting back to life.<br />
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To me, this is what woodland management is all about; tinkering with the natural processes of growth in order to achieve some aim (in this case restoring the beauty of a veteran tree, getting wood for fuel and mushrooms from a low-value pioneer tree, and enhancing the biodiversity (English oaks host more life forms than any other British tree)). I'm happy with the result and pleased that my act of judicious pruning hasn't killed anything but has created space and light for a banquet of flowers to spring up (with attendant bees).<br />
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But not everyone would agree that what I did was a good thing. I met a fellow a few weeks back who told me his mission in life was to save as many life forms as possible and "Do no damage". To that end he was a committed vegan and an activist against eco-crimes and the likes of Monsanto. His commitment to these causes was laudable but when I mentioned to him that I owned a woodland and undertook management practices within it he became a bit brittle. "Woodlands don't need our management," he said, "they did just fine before we came along - why shouldn't they do fine if we left them alone again?" He went on to opine that people who owned woodlands saw themselves as gods and clearly had problems with the size of their egos.<br />
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He had a point and it got me thinking. Having observed other woodland owners on social media I can certainly identify a certain type of person who likes to buy pieces of large machinery and then brag about how many mature trees it can fell in a day. But I certainly didn't see myself or any of my woodland friends fitting into that category. I explained to him that the vast majority of woodlands in Britain were, in fact, not natural at all, and that without some form of management they would quickly lose their raison d'être. True, they may contain a lot of trees and birds and animals, but they are, when all is said and done, human creations. My woodland, for example, contains probably around a thousand sweet chestnut trees - a tree whose native habitat is southern Italy. In the case of the relatively slow growing chestnut, left to its own devices it would mature and eventually fall over in a storm and die (assuming it had not until then succumbed to one of the many diseases currently at large). At this point it would have very little chance of re-establishing itself in the form of seedlings because a far more fast-growing tree would have swamped the entire woodland. Sycamore (<i>acer pseudoplatanus</i>) is native to central and southern Europe and it can easily overtake a southern British woodland. It's a remarkably 'lucky' tree in that rabbits won't touch it, it can grow in the shade and it shoots up very rapidly. If Fox Wood was left alone for fifty years I have no doubt that it would simply revert to a sea of sycamore trees standing over the rotting trunks of everything else. The canopy above would be dense and closed, darkening the forest floor and preventing much from growing. But given that I don't want sycamore trees everywhere I have to manage the woodland in such a way as to encourage certain species to thrive and discourage others.<br />
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This wouldn't necessarily be a problem, if one takes a longer view. Nature, being nature, would eventually balance out such an abundance. Some short-lifecycle species or other - perhaps a beetle - would see all this sycamore and evolve ways of feeding off it. The beetle would experience a precipitous population explosion as it expanded its range to take advantage of the defenceless sycamores, killing them en masse as it gnawed and burrowed its way across the landscape. In a relatively short period of time the beetle would go into overshoot as it exhausted its food supply, thus figuratively chewing off the branch it was sitting on and going into a steep population decline. New sycamores would grow, but there would be a residual population of sycamore-eating beetles at the ready and the two species would dance their merry population explosion and crash dance in ever decreasing magnitude until a harmonious balance was reached. In the meantime the other species of tree, which had been waiting patiently in a few specialist ecological niches where sycamores couldn't reach, would seize their chance to move into the space left behind and diversity would once again bloom, although there would likely have been local extinctions of species along the way. All this might take a very tiny moment in evolutionary time - say 500 years.<br />
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I said all this to my friend and he seemed to take it all in, nodding wisely as I explained my rationale. "500 years, you say?"<br />
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"Give or take a few hundred," I said.<br />
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"So, basically you're impatient then?"<br />
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I had to laugh because yet again he was being perfectly correct. So, yes, maybe we appear impatient, but on the other hand I don't <i>have</i> 500 years, and so I have to manage the woodland and act like the keystone species mankind has been for the past several aeons. The sad truth is that the original forest that covered the entirety of the large island of Britain after the last ice age is now long gone. The incalculable complexity of that ecosystem has been lost in the inky depths of evolutionary time never to return and all we can do is make approximate pale imitations that can certainly be useful and rich in biodiversity and beauty but lacking a certain unseen richness. That's the hand we have been dealt with and there's no point feeling mournful about it. Instead, if we integrate ourselves into the natural rhythms of ecology we can quite easily create a patchwork of new forests and woodlands to offset the damage industrial man has done to the land. Land after all, in temperate places like Britain, wants to become a forest if you let it. And so, if with careful stewardship, we allow this to happen, and if we manage the result wisely, the land can provide us with food and fuel and medicine and building materials and spiritual nourishment, as well as being a home to countless other organisms. And if that weren't reason enough it will also suck carbon out of the atmosphere as the soils are replenished and enriched.<br />
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That is certainly my aim on my small patch of land, and in my next post I'll be talking about agroforestry and sharing some pictures of my newly-created forest garden (I bet you were wondering why I put up 300m of rabbit fencing weren't you?)</div>
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-17419249021042424882016-03-05T10:44:00.000-08:002016-03-06T14:28:50.596-08:00Something Stirs ...<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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You might have been thinking that not much has been happening at Fox Wood given the dearth of posts over the last year. Luckily, nothing could be further from the truth! I've been so busy working on it that I forgot to tell people what has been happening. It's hard to tell all that's been going on there so I shall just give you a brief summary and then upload lots of pictures. I'll promise to update more regularly in future.<br />
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Firstly, and possibly most importantly, I've cleared out a large area of overgrown and bramble/choked trees and am turning the area into a forest garden. This is my new focus. I've begun a permaculture design course with Patrick Whitefield Associates, and then in May I'll be going on a forest garden design course with Martin Crawford in Devon. I decided that I needed to have a more formal education in this area as it will allow me to boost my confidence and credentials.<br />
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Secondly, I have been adding to my orchard. I now have around thirty apple trees, some of which are rare Cornish varieties. In addition to the apples I have about thirty other fruit trees, including pears, quinces, medlars, plums, gages, figs and peaches.<br />
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Thirdly, I have been madly planting trees to make a small mixed woodland in the centre of what is now a field. A couple of readers have been kind enough to donate funds for this using the 'Plant a Tree' button, and I have planted, as requested, walnuts and silver birches.<br />
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Fourthly, another aim of mine is create a green woodworking area for use by the woodland association we set up (<a href="https://www.facebook.com/cornishwoodlands/?fref=ts" target="_blank">SWOC</a>). We aim to build/construct a sheltered workspace where people can learn green carpentry, basket making, charcoal making etc. in the woodland setting. I now have a few clients for charcoal, and the woodland mushrooms are still doing their thing (i.e. growing slowly).<br />
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Anyway, time for some more pictures.<br />
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<span style="text-align: center;">Storm the dog admires the recently-cleared forest garden space. Storm is the latest addition to the family, and is my constant companion when working in the woodland. A springer spaniel from a nearby farm, his parents are working dogs, hence the docked tail. He's only seven-months old at the moment but dreams of one day catching a rabbit.</span><br />
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A pile of seasoned wood I dragged out of hedges that will be used for charcoal production when summer comes. Dry wood is at a premium in this wet and soggy climate.<br />
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Looking at the newly-cleared area from a different angle. There are plenty of coppice stools dotted around but I'll keep them on a short rotation so that the whole area isn't crowded out. The slender stems make great bean poles, for which there is a ready market at the local organic gardeners' association.<br />
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This is a raised bed I made from some of the chestnut wood. I've called it a hugel raised bed because the bottom level is lined with wood. I have yet to fill it with soil but plans are that it will be used to grow herbs. I'm generally using seaweed collected from local beaches as soil enricher, although the soils are already in pretty good shape.<br />
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A section that is overgrown with brambles. The brambles inhibit the growth of the trees and damage them with their thorns when the wind blows (which is often). Brambles are useful for wildlife - as well as great for the blackberries - so I won't eliminate them all.<br />
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When I cut down trees I aim to use as much of the product as I can without wasting anything. Branches and limbs are put on one side for charcoal and smaller sticks are cut up for use at home in the woodburner. Only the really small bits of brash get burned, and even then I'm trying to charcoalise them and turn them into biochar using old oil drums, which will be dug back into the soils. Any remaining wood ash is spread around the fruit trees.<br />
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A local supermarket is selling bird boxes for only £3 each. I've bought quite a few, to add to the ones that are already up. There is now a large diversity of birdlife in the woodland, although I'm not a twitcher so I don't know what many of them are :-)<br />
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This old pollarded oak is my favourite tree in the woodland. There is so much life in it, including ferns growing out of the deep green moss on the branches. I tried to get mistletoe growing on some of the old oaks by squishing seeds into the bark. Nothing happened, however, and then someone pointed out that mistletoe will not grow in the presence of salt, of which there is a lot here as it is blown in on the winds from the Atlantic, which is only a couple of miles away as the crow flies.<br />
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This is a large willow I coppiced. It was getting so big it was blocking out the light to my favourite oak. I have inoculated these logs with oyster mushroom mycelium using a new method I read about. Instead of hammering spore plugs into it using a drill and hammer, I've simply cut deep grooves in the logs using the chainsaw. Into each cut I've slotted a piece of cardboard inoculated with oyster mycelium which I grew myself at home. We'll see if it's successful or not in about a year. If it is then it's a much more efficient way to work.<br />
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The woodland is beginning to green up after a very, very wet winter.<br />
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Down in the chestnut coppice. Worryingly, a friend who owns a nearby woodland (about two miles away) discovered his trees were infected with the disease phytophthora ramorum. A destruction order was issued on his entire woodland and he has had to bear the whole cost himself. I have to consider that this disease may reach my woodland at some point, which would mean the compulsory felling of at least 500 sweet chestnut trees. This is just one reason why I'm aiming to diversify as much as possible - tree diseases are sweeping Britain at present and it would be unrealistic to think Fox Wood is immune.<br />
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Sometimes the trees look a bit like they are having a party ... or is it just me?<br />
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Since introducing hedgehogs I've been building up big piles of fallen sticks to create habitat. These will also provide a plenty of food for birds and other life in the form of grubs and insects. They will eventually rot down into the forest floor and provide further fertility<br />
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This is a section of a large sycamore a tree-surgeon friend felled for me a few weeks ago. The tree was blocking out light to our neighbour's orchard, and also threatening some telephone wires leading to the nearby farm house. I've inoculated it with mushrooms, and left the rest to rot. It will grow back soon enough. Many people hate sycamore and call it a weed tree. I'm not one of them. Sycamore grows very fast, the rabbits won't touch it, and it makes great firewood. If left to get out of hand it can overwhelm a native woodland, so the trick is <u>not</u> to let it get out of hand.<br />
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During general clearing work I uncovered these old granite gateposts that were covered in ivy. It's a reminder that the woodland used to be open fields in the past.<br />
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Speaking of ivy, some of the veteran trees were being choked to death by it. I've severed a lot of the ivy around the trunks, and the trees are bouncing back. Ivy has its place in the woodland and the berries provide food for birds in the winter, but like sycamore, it can overwhelm if given half a chance.<br />
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I have also been removing much of the barbed wire which was strangling the woodland. I've found the easiest way to do this is to cut it into short lengths with bolt cutters - otherwise it is hard to manage. I really don't like barbed wire and will not be reusing it. Instead I'll take it to the dump and throw it in the metal container for recycling.<br />
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This is a section of woodland I have just coppiced. At about 1/4 acre it now requires processing. But we have various building to construct on the land so much of the straight trunks will be used for that. I'm nervous about the disease possibilities mentioned above, so will be replanting some extra trees in a more diverse way.<br />
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The coppiced section viewed from above. The field opposite, which must be about five acres in size, has two horses in it that are used for leisure. On a piece of land this size, using permaculture methods, you could feed at least five families in a very biodiverse habitat. It's amazing how much productive land and biodiversity is sacrificed for people's hobbies!<br />
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Foxgloves coming up. Two years ago I collected hundreds of seeds and walked around the woodland throwing them in handfuls. You can see exactly where each handful landed.<br />
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A small oak I pollarded two years ago. I like pollarding (i.e. cutting the tree a bit higher up) as it stops rabbits and deer damaging them. I have seen one deer in the woodland in the past year, although there are reports of herds of them spreading from the east.<br />
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I'm not sure what has happened here. This large fern has been flattened by something. Perhaps it was a deer sleeping on it, or something ...<br />
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My mushroom experimentation zone. So far none have grown, but the mycelium has spread throughout the wood so I'm hopeful we'll see some mushrooms when the temperatures increase.<br />
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An old border oak. This is a huge tree. Behind it is a sunken lane that would have been used by sheep and cattle for centuries. The more I get to know this piece of land, the more secrets it throws up from the past.<br />
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Every year the grey squirrels get the nuts before I do. Here is a stash of hazels I uncovered. Frustrating, but on the other hand hazelnut-fed grey squirrel cooked in red wine casserole isn't bad.<br />
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A fence I put up using freshly cut oak for stakes. Even though I only put this up 18 months ago the oak has been CONSUMED by turkey tail fungus. No good at all. I'm glad I discovered this susceptibility before I built anything a bit larger with oak.<br />
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Branches of an elder growing through a badger skull. There must be up to 100 elder trees and bushes growing around Fox Wood. I don't mess with it. Elder has many ancient and mystical associations and cutting it down is a pretty unwise thing to do if you don't want to end up like this badger.<br />
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[Update: I've been googling skulls and it actually looks more like a fox than a badger. Badgers have much smaller eye orbits.]<br />
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The newest additions in the orchard include a number of rare varieties. Last autumn we made 180 gallons of cider using apples foraged from the local area. We have a cider barn now, complete with oak barrels and presses. These trees are exposed at the moment but the windbreak I planted using Italian alder grows at least twice as fast so they should be nice and sheltered soon. I started off planting my orchard in a higgledy piggledy fashion, but now I'm planting in the more traditional diamond pattern in order to maximise the efficient usage of the available space.<br />
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What do you do if you find a fishing box washed up on the beach and then pick up a couple of pocketfuls of holm oak acorns from the street? I'll probably use these as evergreen hedging around my forest garden.<br />
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The pond. If this were a holiday brochure it would be called an 'infinity pond'. It's been attracting a lot of wildlife since I filled it. It will shortly have lots of frog and toad spawn in it when I go and collect some from a nearby pond. There are already newts. In the summer there were swallows swooping over it during the day and bats fluttering around by night. It even had some passing ducks on it once.<br />
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It's a bit uninspiring at present but this will be the new copse area. In it are silver birch, beech, oak, dogwood, dog rose, sea buckthorn, pine, yew, broad-leaved lime, walnut and alder.<br />
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A buzzard soars over Fox Wood.<br />
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Down in the forest garden I've planted this Chinese dogwood. Some of these plants are quite pricey, so I've put a wire mesh fence around it (not in the picture) to protect it. Nearby I've also planted gingko, Sichuan peppers, passion fruit, kiwis and grapes. There's plenty more planting to do.<br />
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So, as you can see, things are progressing at Fox Wood. The wood, and all the skills I have learned and am still learning, is now the main plank of my livelihood and this year I aim to grow a much larger proportion of food there and earn more funds from the production of charcoal and other products. By the summer I hope to be able to offer the forest garden as a venue for woodland craft courses, and there are also a few other projects scribbled on the back of envelopes. I'll keep you posted!<br />
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-26164228729130620342015-04-23T02:36:00.000-07:002015-04-23T02:36:48.683-07:00Magic Lakes and Mushrooms<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's been a while since I updated the latest tales from Fox Wood - but never fear - it's not as if nothing has been going on there. In fact, one of the reasons for the lack of updates is that I've been too busy to attend to blogs (which are sadly quite low down on the priority list). So here is a preliminary update of what I have been up to. Alas, there are not too many pictures this time.<br />
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Firstly, as you may notice by looking to the right, I have been busy writing and publishing a book. Yes, <i>The Path to Odin's Lake</i> is about a journey I took last summer from Copenhagen to a forest in Sweden. It's not your average travel book - and in fact it wasn't intended to be a book at all until certain things happened to me on that journey that I felt I must record. I travelled for the most part on foot, had almost no money with me, and cut myself off completely from electronic media and gadgets. I ended up at a sacred lake in that Swedish forest and ... well, if you want to find out more you can buy the book :)<br />
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Secondly, partly as a result of that journey, I have been focusing my attention on growing mushrooms. Why? Well, Fox Wood is ideally suited to mushroom cultivation. It's damp, it's shady and I have an abundant supply of timber. So far I have begun experimenting with different types of wood (chestnut, oak, sycamore and willow) to ascertain what works best. I'm being quite scientific about it, making careful notes and observations and recording them. I hope to be able to grow a decent crop of edible mushrooms every year (that would be shiitake, oysters, lions mane and chicken of the woods) and sell them locally.<br />
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The second reason I am growing mushrooms is because they are awesome. The more I learn about them the more awesome they become. Not only are they a great source of nutrients but more and more research is pointing to the fact that they can be used as a means of bioremediation i.e. healing the Earth. Several species have been found to digest oil spills and chemicals, and there is even a suggestion out there that they could help 'clean up' radiation. They can heal sick bees, restore degraded soils and halt depression. What's not to like? Research in all of these areas is ongoing, but at the forefront of this fungus revolution is the US mycologist Paul Stamets. Check out his short film below.<br />
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But anyway, apart from the mushrooms I have been busy selectively coppicing certain areas in the woodland this winter. Alas, I didn't do as much as I had planned due to my chainsaw breaking down, nevertheless I have plenty of hazel, hawthorn and holly cut and drying ready for next winter.<br />
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Oh, and I also cut down a huge multi-stemmed sycamore with my friend and tree surgeon Nigel. It was blocking out the light to my neighbour's orchard and the wood will be used for fuel and mushroom cultivation.<br />
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The pond is finally finished, save for a few aesthetic details, and a number of newts have taken up residency there. It's looking particularly good for something dug by hand over a period of 18 months - I'm proud of it. I will take some pictures of it on my next visit.<br />
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Apart from that, I have planted up another 100 or so trees in what will be a mixed woodland area. These include seven walnut trees, plus a mixture of lime, oak, willow (including a large willow-only coppice area), beech, dogwood, silver birch and hazel.<br />
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The orchard has expanded significantly, with 12 new apple trees of different varieties, a couple of pears, a couple of plums and a medlar. The mixed edible forest/orchard is progressing nicely.<br />
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Three more rescue hedgehogs were released last week to add to the other two that were released just before winter. As hedgehogs are something of an endangered species it's great to be able to provide them with a safe haven.<br />
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Well, that's all the update for now. I will take my camera on the next visit and upload some more photos.<br />
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BTW if you are interested in reading my book you can get a free 10% sample sent by email by clicking <a href="https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/535580" target="_blank">here</a>.<br />
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-58248906412903535702014-11-02T02:17:00.000-08:002014-11-02T10:42:19.725-08:00Autumn Falls<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Halloween at Fox Wood, or <i>nos calan gwaf</i> as it's called in Cornish</td></tr>
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Well, it's been a while since I updated this blog so here's what's been going on at Fox Wood since the summer. In July our good woodland neighbours Trev and Becky got married at the local chapel and held the reception in the woods, turning the sleepy woods into an enchanting fairy wonderland of light and music. It was quite a party and the locals will no doubt be talking about it for years to come.<br />
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The summer was long and hot. It didn't rain for weeks at a time (although Trev and Becky managed to pick the one day for their wedding when it bucketed down) meaning I had my work cut out watering the 300 or so trees I planted last winter. Luckily they have all survived and are thriving — especially the Italian alders I planted as windbreaks, which seem to be settling in well.<br />
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The hot weather was excellent for growing food and we had a bumper crop of tomatoes this year.<br />
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We also have a bumper crop of firewood.<br />
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So I've spent an awful lot of time and money installing a wood burner at our house. Given the uncertain future of gas supplies, plus the need to use a more sustainable fuel, this should stand us in good stead for the future. The copper kettle is for heating up water for hot water bottles at bed time!</div>
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A couple of months back we took home a couple of young hedgehogs from a <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pricklesandpaws" target="_blank">local rescue centre</a>. Geoffrey and Suki, as they were called, should help keep down the slug population.<br />
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Autumn is now here, although it remains very warm, and the trees are finally losing their leaves. We got quite a harvest of chestnuts this year. Some of them were for roasting on the fire, some are for cooking and some are for planting.<br />
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This is the Hog Hotel we made for the hedgehogs. The tiles are from the roof of a local church that was undergoing renovation.<br />
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The tree nursery. About 200 seedlings have been successfully grown since last year. I aim to do the same this year.<br />
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A bath of oaks. One person's trash is another's rabbit-proof tree nursery.<br />
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Plenty of birds used the houses this year. There is now a family of wrens hopping around near this one.<br />
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This one had a family of finches in it.<br />
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Chestnut shoots in a ray of sun light.<br />
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Moss growing on the woodland floor<br />
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Down in the section of wood I coppiced last winter there has been an outburst of life. Having fenced it off from rabbits and deer the plants and trees have been free to grow unhindered.<br />
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The new growth is between six and ten feet high.<br />
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The whole area has turned into a thriving patch. In among the new growth there is a riot of plant and animal life going on. I have found newts, bats and evan a weasel here, as well as solitary bees and a couple of frogs.<br />
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In this picture you can see the new growth in the foreground and the old growth behind it. I'll probably give the maidens in the background a couple more years to grow bigger before I coppice that section.<br />
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The combination of chicken wire fence and brash piles has kept out the deer and rabbits. There are hardly any deer in the area but reports of sightings are getting more common and I don't want to take the chance.<br />
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The ride leading up through the woodland.<br />
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I discovered something pretty amazing recently. Whilst studying satellite images of the land I noticed something unusual in the adjacent field. I enhanced the colour on the image and saw some circular shapes lying beneath the soil.<br />
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Some friendly pagan archaeologists were called in with dowsing rods and they discerned six or more stone hut circles, including one beneath Fox Wood. They also detected powerful energy currents running through the land connecting the site of the local church to a nearby hilltop with a stone circle. The likelihood is that a bronze age settlement was here. It's quite amazing to think that Fox Wood would have been home to families of farmers up to 4,000 years ago.<br />
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Anyway, back to the present day, and it's time for tea.<br />
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Mushrooms are popping up everywhere. I counted at least 20 different types on a quick walk around the woods and field yesterday, although I haven't identified them yet. Here are some of them.<br />
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Speaking of mushrooms, I'm planning on growing them. Lots of them. Fox Wood has the perfect conditions for growing fungus with its damp and sheltered woodland and the abundance of fresh hardwoods. I'm already growing shiitake, oyster and chicken of the woods. There's a lot to learn but I'm on the case.<br />
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Apart from growing and selling mushrooms I'm also producing charcoal. I already have an order to produce 100 bags in 2015. I have collected a number of oil drums from local garages to turn into portable charcoal kilns.<br />
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Soon it will be time to start the coppicing work again. I have given my chainsaw a service, bought some new chains and a pair of chainsaw trousers, and will start the cutting work in ernest in December. I have a lot of work to do this winter but I'm looking forward to it. There are a lot of overgrown hazels that need coppicing for a start.<br />
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But I'll be leaving this old pollard oak well alone. I regard these old trees as guardians of the forest.<br />
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I have plenty of projects not yet finished. First and foremost in the poly-tunnel. I have dug out by hand and moved about 100 trailers of soil from my basement and deposited it here. It will form the base for the poly-tunnel, although I need the local friendly farmer to dump a few loads of manure on it from his cows so it will have time to rot down over winter. The two trees you can see in the centre are avocados.<br />
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Yes, we've even got oranges growing outside here. Not the nicest oranges you will have ever seen, but oranges nevertheless.<br />
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And then there's the pond. I've almost finished digging it and have now saved up for and bought a liner. It just needs a couple days further prep work before it is ready for filling. I discovered a frog sitting in the empty pond last week ... waiting.<br />
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Last year I planted several hundred trees at Fox Wood. This year I'll be doing the same again as I turn the field from a degraded piece of exhausted farm land into a biodiverse forest garden and orchard.<br />
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Did I mention the cider making? We — being our merry band of woodlanders — made our first batch in October, filling two oak barrels with the fermenting juice from apples gleaned from unloved apple trees across west Cornwall. A first tasting will occur at Winter Solstice and then it should be ready for drinking in April.<br />
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That's it for now from Fox Wood. I hope everyone had a good Halloween and is enjoying Autumn (or Spring if you live Down Under). Oh, and watch this space for my forthcoming book about a journey I undertook through a Swedish forest this summer entitled <i>The Path to Odin's Lake</i>.<br />
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com16tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-50098952118298141432014-06-11T03:18:00.000-07:002014-06-11T03:18:05.737-07:00Smokin'! Making Charcoal <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Part of the longer term vision for Fox Wood is to produce charcoal from any of the wood that doesn't have a primary use, so a couple of weeks ago I took the plunge and did my first charcoal burn. I did it under the tutorship of Greg Humphries, a friend who is also a woodsman and runs courses in Cornwall.<br />
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First of all Greg cut up a load of willow branches that he had collected. The wood can be any type, but must be properly seasoned and of approximately equal thickness.<br />
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Proper charcoal kilns are expensive (the one I have my eye on is £1,300) but you can make your own one for free by using an old oil drum. Garages often want to get rid of them, so ask around, but make sure there is no residue or paint on it by having a hot fire in it first. Then you just need to cut vents in it using an angle grinder.<br />
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We selected a site for the burn and dug out the earth. It should be away from trees as the process gives off a lot of noxious gases as the resin in the wood is burned.<br />
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The kiln needs to be propped up on blocks to keep it stable and to form the basis for channels for the air vents, and then soil is packed in around so that air can get in from four directions.<br />
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Next we need to load up the kiln.<br />
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The wood is packed in like a 3D jigsaw puzzle, leaving as little space as possible left over. At the bottom is a mix of dry willow sticks, newspaper and wood chips to help start the fire. A plastic tube is inserted down the centre which will be removed when the kiln is full. This provides a central chimney from which the smoke can escape.<br />
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When the kiln is full and the chimney pipe has been removed it is lit using embers from a hot fire.<br />
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Now is the exciting part. For the best part of three hours the kilns will be burning and a huge amount of smoke is produced (you must inform the local fire service in advance or face the embarrassment—and cost—of having them turn up to extinguish your kilns). During the burn the wood is turned to pure carbon and to do this you must make sure it burns in an even manner throughout the kiln. Too hot and with too much oxygen and it will turn to ash, too cold or without enough oxygen and you will end up with scorched wood. It's a constant process of monitoring and adjusting air vents and the only way to learn it is by doing it with someone who is already good at it. The fire must burn evenly throughout the kiln so it is a case of paying attention to the colour of the metal and noting where it is hot or cool. Water can be splashed on the kiln if it is too hot in one area, and vents can be opened up a little if it is too cool. An uneven burn is what we are trying to avoid.<br />
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With larger kilns the burn will take all night (or day) but oil drums are smaller and therefore take less time. Traditionally, charcoal burners have lived in the woods for this very purpose, and sat on one-legged stools so that they would fall over if they fell asleep. Of course, if you don't have a full-sized kiln but still want to produce a decent amount of charcoal you could have lots of oil drums in a circle and achieve the same volume in a lot less time.<br />
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During the burn the lids are placed on the kilns and grass sod is placed around the edges to keep it on tight and to form top vents. It is a very smoky few hours!<br />
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When the smoke becomes thin and bluish it means that this stage of the burn is almost complete. More soil is placed on the kilns and the lower vents are blocked off to prevent any more oxygen getting in. It's quite fiddly and time-consuming this stage but if any oxygen gets in at all then all the charcoal will turn to ash so it's worth getting right. If we were using purpose-made charcoal kilns we wouldn't have this problem as the lids seal shut.<br />
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Then we simply go away and come back the next day. In our case it was two days later, and when the kiln was opened you could immediately see that 2/3 of the volume of wood had disappeared (gone up in smoke). If you open it up too soon the rush of oxygen will cause the whole thing to ignite and you'll have a large and unexpected barbecue on your hands.<br />
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In this case the burn had gone well, with not too much ash and not too many scorched bits of brown wood. The next stage was to break the larger chunks up by hand and then put the charcoal through a metal sieve to get rid of the pieces that are too small. These bits that are left over can be pulverised into <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Biochar-Solution-Farming-Climate/dp/0865716773" target="_blank">biochar</a>, or they can be spread on paths to deter slugs and snails.<br />
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All that remains is to put it in bags and sell it! These ones are for sale at a local farm shop near Penzance, but there is plenty of scope for selling them to holidaymakers at campsites. They go for £7 a bag, and when you consider that a single oil drum produces about four bags per burn you can see that it makes sense to produce larger volumes of charcoal rather than smaller. A large kiln would probably produce 50-60 bags per burn.<br />
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If you're in Cornwall Greg runs lots of different <a href="http://www.futuretracks.co.uk/" target="_blank">woodland-related courses</a> from his base at <a href="http://www.plan-itearth.org.uk/roundhouse-holidays" target="_blank">Plan It Earth</a>, near Penzance. You can wild camp there too - or stay in the hobbit house.<br />
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-7840811612607286302014-04-01T14:10:00.002-07:002014-04-01T14:35:26.530-07:00Life Returns<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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The picture above shows one of the sweet chestnut stools in Fox Wood coming back to life. If you remember, I cut down these trees in early January - and now the sap is rising again and the trees are starting to produce new shoots as they come back to life.<br />
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I have been busy! Looking after a woodland can be a lot of work - especially at this stage when I am trying to get things established. I have planted around 180 trees in the last month, and have been working very hard to get all of the cut wood stored and fences built so that the rabbits do not get to eat the new shoots and destroy all my work. What follows is a selection of pictures from Fox Wood that I took today. There are quite a few of them ...<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdMWe4aIYfz3Tz_ZXmX1npGbEZBJPgeW3mUOldDP6w5u2nknT_OgYOHY3Z2q_Xk2N9JZC9KyiVhH2VLYX_qEbdGOSANmbnWiDd2SDlKtemD1dtfJ4lYTahidim1LEVNXtJLILplN0465O-/s3200/DSC_2802.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhdMWe4aIYfz3Tz_ZXmX1npGbEZBJPgeW3mUOldDP6w5u2nknT_OgYOHY3Z2q_Xk2N9JZC9KyiVhH2VLYX_qEbdGOSANmbnWiDd2SDlKtemD1dtfJ4lYTahidim1LEVNXtJLILplN0465O-/s3200/DSC_2802.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A little beautification project was needed at the field entrance. The soil I used was dug out from the basement of our house 10 miles away. It has not seen the light of day since 1880 and is full of clay pipes and horse shoes.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYOTHcznEb6Tq8mZoU2Mipe3JDdoo3yS-iFv5kVYT-m3DCPeF-E8M34MpyYZpwIbH6ZHG9HkwOx3L4uL4voepZH0aC8CRHBwyPK4q9DmiBNpIEd5ZcD8VW2nyTeeP1UnxYvMc7SWU4KvJx/s3200/DSC_2803.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYOTHcznEb6Tq8mZoU2Mipe3JDdoo3yS-iFv5kVYT-m3DCPeF-E8M34MpyYZpwIbH6ZHG9HkwOx3L4uL4voepZH0aC8CRHBwyPK4q9DmiBNpIEd5ZcD8VW2nyTeeP1UnxYvMc7SWU4KvJx/s3200/DSC_2803.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some idiot dumped a load of old tyres in a hedge. I wish I had caught them ... I would have thanked them and asked if they had any more.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiUiFzo6L9cHR_7BRDXobv6oEOSKFoM7qFkNGGRHpJWOFbz_6_-czdzXOZmpCQ08Obl6vgvWXpgUvLlYU1Q6tOER3S76bqjqZ73LL2LE2SN-9rpsuo5EYorlp4d9KLqzilIiGEQxpNfclR/s3200/DSC_2804.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiUiFzo6L9cHR_7BRDXobv6oEOSKFoM7qFkNGGRHpJWOFbz_6_-czdzXOZmpCQ08Obl6vgvWXpgUvLlYU1Q6tOER3S76bqjqZ73LL2LE2SN-9rpsuo5EYorlp4d9KLqzilIiGEQxpNfclR/s3200/DSC_2804.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is the site of the future poly tunnel. I'm levelling the ground so that it is not so steep.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A silver birch coming to life again.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The half-finished pond is due for completion this year. At the moment it is acting as a nursery for about 300 oak seedlings, which I will use for hedging and exchange/sale.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSpRruS5MFe50PPCDDQN5h8jsZ5ufsJPC4ZjtdHpkAAWTmM3sxZzVBtbySqscPN7DyeO_ZaRBVM_-7y_vt3C58ncB_9zmetAwUR-qoWD2Fe2tpANl-X1LP7oUBWRexcFcTqSgd8JrppDB3/s3200/DSC_2808.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjSpRruS5MFe50PPCDDQN5h8jsZ5ufsJPC4ZjtdHpkAAWTmM3sxZzVBtbySqscPN7DyeO_ZaRBVM_-7y_vt3C58ncB_9zmetAwUR-qoWD2Fe2tpANl-X1LP7oUBWRexcFcTqSgd8JrppDB3/s3200/DSC_2808.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A willow in bud.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAYrBIVOdnu0r0RakyMEDKHXfzxjjsiSW1HKq_VFou1pRLX9ZDcSjSlfmoD4BrYmSP22Vvhxum5qK8Uj6rFeYFHrGebLGwROlLkPKAiOqBFTxJ-78CJq6uBUu1dPPdpbjeWxx-ShaoEQqk/s3200/DSC_2809.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjAYrBIVOdnu0r0RakyMEDKHXfzxjjsiSW1HKq_VFou1pRLX9ZDcSjSlfmoD4BrYmSP22Vvhxum5qK8Uj6rFeYFHrGebLGwROlLkPKAiOqBFTxJ-78CJq6uBUu1dPPdpbjeWxx-ShaoEQqk/s3200/DSC_2809.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">It doesn't look like much but this is the new edible hedge. I only had enough cash for a 10m section this year, but in it are apples, pears, crab apples, hazel, oak, sycamore and plums. In a few years it will be awesome.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXPhHhajQWvSM63cjcT611fFbWmEL9lBYUHeTAzZbQLqO4OhnH45f4pgz09Frb1_oizkiSQC1dAx8BsOr0KB4eMTpl76RlFCs7IS3qHsC9IZ8mdbrIXgT77zfO5nLJXopru1tMRixn1KIM/s3200/DSC_2810.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhXPhHhajQWvSM63cjcT611fFbWmEL9lBYUHeTAzZbQLqO4OhnH45f4pgz09Frb1_oizkiSQC1dAx8BsOr0KB4eMTpl76RlFCs7IS3qHsC9IZ8mdbrIXgT77zfO5nLJXopru1tMRixn1KIM/s3200/DSC_2810.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is the beginning of a large wind break of Italian alders that stretches about 150m. There are 150 trees planted here and they will shield the orchard from the strong southwesterlies that blast the field. These trees get really big really fast, and they fix nitrogen as well.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjabZocKyDSgOb3iD3U9V5rLHbOwjD0rI3wgR9aA4bY83iy8bVLd80DXeMBa-zB0r9dT8Z9a9enytk6NGNjqPYTCV-6Oiwd4oAO8wfJkUG_AAWdmFLAHsIe316aUAslxs9tzdOxdqrGqtXA/s3200/DSC_2811.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjabZocKyDSgOb3iD3U9V5rLHbOwjD0rI3wgR9aA4bY83iy8bVLd80DXeMBa-zB0r9dT8Z9a9enytk6NGNjqPYTCV-6Oiwd4oAO8wfJkUG_AAWdmFLAHsIe316aUAslxs9tzdOxdqrGqtXA/s3200/DSC_2811.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This apple had been attacked by (very large) rabbits last year and seems to be dead. All of the branches are brittle and there is no sign of life ...</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN3g7i8y2Z0s_sV5q1frvbechii8iAItb0noHfXg4Iq_qc1sAz69IMGbwUcF9bzpamXRr3cH59PciLNQI3YOwrf86uHCLnFXmO-In_LU0wrk6lZ2DJCR1wVovu_IXTfyq2on8PVimLkiHg/s3200/DSC_2812.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgN3g7i8y2Z0s_sV5q1frvbechii8iAItb0noHfXg4Iq_qc1sAz69IMGbwUcF9bzpamXRr3cH59PciLNQI3YOwrf86uHCLnFXmO-In_LU0wrk6lZ2DJCR1wVovu_IXTfyq2on8PVimLkiHg/s3200/DSC_2812.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">... until I removed the spire guard and noticed this. It's really hard to kill a young tree!</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhydX8__3fOtYeyvD-xXejnI-vAzvsWazoqcC3J1M_xR283b3SWYwi2-9RJNTPsjY5YdN9WQmJRWoTxE4aUIwvXmdA7oMjmit_jvR3cKWVsCACatyyl9iW3MJOA8y0gMikHmngdMp8q2xvU/s3200/DSC_2813.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhydX8__3fOtYeyvD-xXejnI-vAzvsWazoqcC3J1M_xR283b3SWYwi2-9RJNTPsjY5YdN9WQmJRWoTxE4aUIwvXmdA7oMjmit_jvR3cKWVsCACatyyl9iW3MJOA8y0gMikHmngdMp8q2xvU/s3200/DSC_2813.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This almond is the first tree to blossom. There are plenty of bees and other pollinators around, so hopefully it will produce some fruit this year (yes, almonds are fruits - closely related to peaches).</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4vmv_NJ-a8SN-ykTJFiyiaEVl6qjhnuXBEfOtoojD4phEE0LXwmbqbL9uo5ehyjROEaBxSuH5fS9i2JaHLP4LjD1J2JcJRKYqaAvbcxADfQuJP_aDIYkoOHlJoqbYNJiDUDVZt_55i4jM/s3200/DSC_2814.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg4vmv_NJ-a8SN-ykTJFiyiaEVl6qjhnuXBEfOtoojD4phEE0LXwmbqbL9uo5ehyjROEaBxSuH5fS9i2JaHLP4LjD1J2JcJRKYqaAvbcxADfQuJP_aDIYkoOHlJoqbYNJiDUDVZt_55i4jM/s3200/DSC_2814.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is the section of the field where I killed the grass by covering it with silage plastic for six months. I have removed the plastic now and have sown clover seeds to fix nitrogen and out-compete the grass. I've also sown a load of old veggie seeds randomly to see what does well. There are lettuces, carrots, radishes, coriander and a few other things just tossed in. You can tell I've been reading Masanobu Fukuoka's '<i>The One Straw Revolution</i>' !</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtuqLiVBcJIrMbvASciuE0tRSWfwt4oBt-0T0DiUgCeHYqWcGN2PFeMENIaES0G6_kp2u4BxIxMVgIul2ZTLHf3IAlmC3msJ5238rZAjW0plY-aRuQkOXOiq_csQUtA49YaeA6rL8-q7gj/s3200/DSC_2815.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtuqLiVBcJIrMbvASciuE0tRSWfwt4oBt-0T0DiUgCeHYqWcGN2PFeMENIaES0G6_kp2u4BxIxMVgIul2ZTLHf3IAlmC3msJ5238rZAjW0plY-aRuQkOXOiq_csQUtA49YaeA6rL8-q7gj/s3200/DSC_2815.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Here's an insect hotel I made. Several bees have moved in already - so they must like it.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxWkPvShl6Ap2WXfrFIXR8f-YmpFYqdQhNgo4nFEawp7I3zlWSJnNxATtpgCqBia_mU_Tj18EQ0wdwKZFGptiLGClOyBICOJfxkfJIVON32xlfX-tIQLX6z6udwx5GOZr_kZwbilPHou1r/s3200/DSC_2816.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxWkPvShl6Ap2WXfrFIXR8f-YmpFYqdQhNgo4nFEawp7I3zlWSJnNxATtpgCqBia_mU_Tj18EQ0wdwKZFGptiLGClOyBICOJfxkfJIVON32xlfX-tIQLX6z6udwx5GOZr_kZwbilPHou1r/s3200/DSC_2816.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is a small stand of hazel that I planted for coppice. Because the whips are so small at the moment I had to devise a method of keeping them from falling/blowing over, so I tied string around them between two poles. </td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRlzxv_tHTopSFR54m6aBa5BAE-ei4HcRIjKWNm8yPiVejL3jknMiBwBAjDVYBM_BSoW_sFk8WyQB9ZZsk9TPZbWM071HDnmP9pCILbb_KlF-4RGgDWuBLekG7_Ao29D4HiOnllg1U5V6b/s3200/DSC_2817.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjRlzxv_tHTopSFR54m6aBa5BAE-ei4HcRIjKWNm8yPiVejL3jknMiBwBAjDVYBM_BSoW_sFk8WyQB9ZZsk9TPZbWM071HDnmP9pCILbb_KlF-4RGgDWuBLekG7_Ao29D4HiOnllg1U5V6b/s3200/DSC_2817.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some purple flowers that just popped up in the grass.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMBz5QCFnYuIpdw4FRyiSmfEJelv1aaMFgZHixpMvuhe6sGoq6vvp3nLz3TlT-nnvg7sWWbnF8u7CIgQ7AQ_wRq7Evmqp6v3hlZB7Xmvgrr2yOHWT5DAhhvX7hqPsjl-i2GTVq95RoO78C/s3200/DSC_2818.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgMBz5QCFnYuIpdw4FRyiSmfEJelv1aaMFgZHixpMvuhe6sGoq6vvp3nLz3TlT-nnvg7sWWbnF8u7CIgQ7AQ_wRq7Evmqp6v3hlZB7Xmvgrr2yOHWT5DAhhvX7hqPsjl-i2GTVq95RoO78C/s3200/DSC_2818.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The edge of my land and originally a gateway. I've planted common alder here to block this off. They grow quite fast and they are wide and thick. They are forever spraying chemicals on this field and I'm trying to stop them drifting onto my land on the wind.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZB0AnVc91kPU5WoJ8evM9poqR882FZZ_GdsQD2ZvhQLCTLX6eyFSQOal1kyaUipGw2B95ZBQWvvDc7KswEqr-3nrlSdjhAX5XWDYm67HbYVluP2sb31gfJx3OS2SBvaBBcA-Fp4axJnGy/s3200/DSC_2819.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZB0AnVc91kPU5WoJ8evM9poqR882FZZ_GdsQD2ZvhQLCTLX6eyFSQOal1kyaUipGw2B95ZBQWvvDc7KswEqr-3nrlSdjhAX5XWDYm67HbYVluP2sb31gfJx3OS2SBvaBBcA-Fp4axJnGy/s3200/DSC_2819.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A sycamore sapling unfolding its leaves.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJWQ26Y44g2OX58aOLgwc1TNzSzJQRrDrfJwGd2emHnxaAyFglBUeScbIqYLsoZcfryLlA8H3-yLvtABwyRZ2Li9PRt02YEyirm3kTeRhMJQljsHsqIuoVLqgiZjKroonNZ_JBhsPN3JH2/s3200/DSC_2820.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJWQ26Y44g2OX58aOLgwc1TNzSzJQRrDrfJwGd2emHnxaAyFglBUeScbIqYLsoZcfryLlA8H3-yLvtABwyRZ2Li9PRt02YEyirm3kTeRhMJQljsHsqIuoVLqgiZjKroonNZ_JBhsPN3JH2/s3200/DSC_2820.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sycamore leaf emerging.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY4M_XfEph9KUOHiIZwuVZQABKqWfOxCBdoWFOiq-wACVQl-r7a9tLP7B2iqzjXxD5dWHBuB0pyuBI5uyJthhSn12-CCNNzCpuvJg5rIm6Rx37Atxeqka-exjWT3iKvd3FSSQTO4Gi5HRz/s3200/DSC_2821.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhY4M_XfEph9KUOHiIZwuVZQABKqWfOxCBdoWFOiq-wACVQl-r7a9tLP7B2iqzjXxD5dWHBuB0pyuBI5uyJthhSn12-CCNNzCpuvJg5rIm6Rx37Atxeqka-exjWT3iKvd3FSSQTO4Gi5HRz/s3200/DSC_2821.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The kids' vegetable plots.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeFeDYXCQz0DGa9K2_Wpy0ZYYBRzno3CTV3JGKCQKpNIbo9y-hwdZk76ZDJBH7KsT7U57m8Y98sxVnEMMT4serQP4VlbuDu_yMKjdsfwa2rZsmYx4uPXEOhWn1KRssSjeZ9U93kdYnizrF/s3200/DSC_2822.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgeFeDYXCQz0DGa9K2_Wpy0ZYYBRzno3CTV3JGKCQKpNIbo9y-hwdZk76ZDJBH7KsT7U57m8Y98sxVnEMMT4serQP4VlbuDu_yMKjdsfwa2rZsmYx4uPXEOhWn1KRssSjeZ9U93kdYnizrF/s3200/DSC_2822.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Down in the coppice wood.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIEyuRG6kkZCY-DFZIdKHiTmiPvN7guv-xKZoSPMlcRakDdSUN42YVe8YgEUbtPnXDJvH7KKrMGaHX_fHaAbIf4EaYARBPE2OEO4nyJMjV-nVG8ck48eRR6roW4ej24dd-qd7gnlbDogIe/s3200/DSC_2824.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhIEyuRG6kkZCY-DFZIdKHiTmiPvN7guv-xKZoSPMlcRakDdSUN42YVe8YgEUbtPnXDJvH7KKrMGaHX_fHaAbIf4EaYARBPE2OEO4nyJMjV-nVG8ck48eRR6roW4ej24dd-qd7gnlbDogIe/s3200/DSC_2824.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Patches of bluebells are appearing.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPSZiD3UCDW7YGSH1HSdOe6fWqQAsrPgxxoLNnJCEeXvP-saZSk1uvj_w3-TkWXfkkLXgVTesklUUqxNmUKsBkr7jxVyaskZeXAuQ6O4ZH_iQpXj7v3SReYbC4BoR72o8Poln91GwFaIS9/s3200/DSC_2825.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPSZiD3UCDW7YGSH1HSdOe6fWqQAsrPgxxoLNnJCEeXvP-saZSk1uvj_w3-TkWXfkkLXgVTesklUUqxNmUKsBkr7jxVyaskZeXAuQ6O4ZH_iQpXj7v3SReYbC4BoR72o8Poln91GwFaIS9/s3200/DSC_2825.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A close-up of the woodland floor.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzqvqFDFdQavpuAQpgFC9pkhyphenhyphenojqupVo9bY6F6znO8QMnG4v_piDjHFANVtkxZgdzoDqpki73i1fMZpj9MCrTAq2xeStdE__lkHFruBss643B31o5P3DCXyhpwyLjADY24ZVUlMP1mFi2s/s3200/DSC_2826.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzqvqFDFdQavpuAQpgFC9pkhyphenhyphenojqupVo9bY6F6znO8QMnG4v_piDjHFANVtkxZgdzoDqpki73i1fMZpj9MCrTAq2xeStdE__lkHFruBss643B31o5P3DCXyhpwyLjADY24ZVUlMP1mFi2s/s3200/DSC_2826.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">And another one.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLpEUXxfkItv58wuCZE-NSiMzt_Xho6o4G2DIcjUM_DSiytHRvE9j95QEGnyr62TR-DhdFXcKc1izodA0St-mI_xEZMJiPXtcIn7TYiI2zJnvvnRdXUSB8gakBoCdeWylTEYd-9gH9Hw5M/s3200/DSC_2827.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLpEUXxfkItv58wuCZE-NSiMzt_Xho6o4G2DIcjUM_DSiytHRvE9j95QEGnyr62TR-DhdFXcKc1izodA0St-mI_xEZMJiPXtcIn7TYiI2zJnvvnRdXUSB8gakBoCdeWylTEYd-9gH9Hw5M/s3200/DSC_2827.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This might not be obvious but a natural pond has started to form here. Ancient maps reveal that this used to be an animal pen a few hundred years ago. It's right at the bottom of my land and the valley - a fast running stream with little beaches is just beyond!</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYDH3catwKGZrj1Yli5id3oHmfYwKM9kYoIKEmaQOgvix8xqMve1KmE2nNYIldFhKAeRIYpm5D3Vi1BT_bqlcC-CtRjagZ465gpAG6m8fpKUxnBshBCA6JDp9iWHy4gvXNWMFaAhpe-alK/s3200/DSC_2828.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYDH3catwKGZrj1Yli5id3oHmfYwKM9kYoIKEmaQOgvix8xqMve1KmE2nNYIldFhKAeRIYpm5D3Vi1BT_bqlcC-CtRjagZ465gpAG6m8fpKUxnBshBCA6JDp9iWHy4gvXNWMFaAhpe-alK/s3200/DSC_2828.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">And this, which runs down one side of the woodland, used to be a drovers track in times past. This area has been farmed for at least five thousand years and the land is criss-crossed with tracks if you know what you are looking for. You can see that (wild) animals are still using it and leaving tracks.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2yaTLjEP5l8vXi78wBxyQ7eWIJVjww-3m09NFGTQk5VJsETQmXVnLUlJh-WMQYOmSJc5DKM8WXMpDivzifVc2cComhwrGnN8dm1heA2BUv5B-5C0q-yzC5txlIGXMb3xOJlusVJ58k5M3/s3200/DSC_2829.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi2yaTLjEP5l8vXi78wBxyQ7eWIJVjww-3m09NFGTQk5VJsETQmXVnLUlJh-WMQYOmSJc5DKM8WXMpDivzifVc2cComhwrGnN8dm1heA2BUv5B-5C0q-yzC5txlIGXMb3xOJlusVJ58k5M3/s3200/DSC_2829.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A bit of dead wood. Although I have an itchy chainsaw finger, standing deadwood is excellent habitat for insects and grubs and enhances the biodiversity of the woodland immensely. I've heard it said that you should leave at least 10% of the wood dead. Fungus loves it too.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_72JI3riIb4WW6nHKk0FOQzpTcUF5J7dODRoJussR-g4CHF9CROFr6XPfbTudv_q2d7IjVTt76p5HCr_CApVVdjLrng3h6PjgqDGkI3F9oXu3UFr8xD3VvmNnIcPzk2UuLYaWPYwM0Rh7/s3200/DSC_2830.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh_72JI3riIb4WW6nHKk0FOQzpTcUF5J7dODRoJussR-g4CHF9CROFr6XPfbTudv_q2d7IjVTt76p5HCr_CApVVdjLrng3h6PjgqDGkI3F9oXu3UFr8xD3VvmNnIcPzk2UuLYaWPYwM0Rh7/s3200/DSC_2830.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An elder bush coming into leaf. I love elder so I'm encouraging it wherever I see it growing. You can make great wine with the flowers and the berries, and the plant generally has more uses than you can shake a stick at ... not all of them wholesome.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE9mdUUdMGTiR7KBychGLhSsiRPFrpsI-7gUIVrq_UyjknYS2XTyLqdkCcfZ2qx5mNBLko37WarBNApToKgLyITAHdpPDFwM71Nr2x5PluZcacThPnmIQqEVwa3ZWIfYkH17OuAPMBE3o-/s3200/DSC_2831.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgE9mdUUdMGTiR7KBychGLhSsiRPFrpsI-7gUIVrq_UyjknYS2XTyLqdkCcfZ2qx5mNBLko37WarBNApToKgLyITAHdpPDFwM71Nr2x5PluZcacThPnmIQqEVwa3ZWIfYkH17OuAPMBE3o-/s3200/DSC_2831.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Looking at trees, you get to see the forces that shaped them. This one clearly shows how the wind rushing along the valley has given it a distinctive shape.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyk4IptAhF9iCLP1OiopgRisjf01Zdh4xuwSwhlcb44HsPZdutuB0nnfCIHwXiexip_b4D1QZDCzOvcDzNwsrrVHIrVxhDNKnYgodr84rCbRov4hbkw8L-1f1YZFr2AuBdffg1NHNK-zRd/s3200/DSC_2832.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyk4IptAhF9iCLP1OiopgRisjf01Zdh4xuwSwhlcb44HsPZdutuB0nnfCIHwXiexip_b4D1QZDCzOvcDzNwsrrVHIrVxhDNKnYgodr84rCbRov4hbkw8L-1f1YZFr2AuBdffg1NHNK-zRd/s3200/DSC_2832.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This row of alder was planted before the rest of the woodland, about 25 years ago. It would have grown faster than the oak and chestnut maidens, shielding them from strong winds. We felled one of them and the wood is dark orange for a few weeks. I will grow mushrooms in the logs and one section is being given to a green woodworking friend who will make bowls from it.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5fwkt3s5RiauJH0ayrFOSFNyzXgnO3Z-Y5qpzBiGJrjdXIPDbYfiII_ADTujraeNsAZXjIob88AiZcOJIYDj_ch_VImReedL30K5ad3i4XC_SXdiwcaV3SwEUAlFK4ASgRX724O439UrD/s3200/DSC_2833.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5fwkt3s5RiauJH0ayrFOSFNyzXgnO3Z-Y5qpzBiGJrjdXIPDbYfiII_ADTujraeNsAZXjIob88AiZcOJIYDj_ch_VImReedL30K5ad3i4XC_SXdiwcaV3SwEUAlFK4ASgRX724O439UrD/s3200/DSC_2833.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Ferns unfurling.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhduES86gJ-geGj2DO9r0Uf0COjMr0E3Tjce3pklvF0NB80a2SRkVOcNKCfgHPPAMAlvc70kCRLPsHK3WUu07i0mwNwAvEZ_vTRtxwjm_SsXr-G3v1BaA-hw6d8oj0iH94lyunPrmh6MBY6/s3200/DSC_2834.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhduES86gJ-geGj2DO9r0Uf0COjMr0E3Tjce3pklvF0NB80a2SRkVOcNKCfgHPPAMAlvc70kCRLPsHK3WUu07i0mwNwAvEZ_vTRtxwjm_SsXr-G3v1BaA-hw6d8oj0iH94lyunPrmh6MBY6/s3200/DSC_2834.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Not sure what this is ...</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixSBrFK1WZtdxz2hmh70w5nlB0MbHYeTKgudpVEzwaXIy12eQ2_E6vyOLDP45VqPJMDp_qQxp6K-lebZ10D7a30Q2JuaVK-YKe4lhb8kvc5hPZhIPlBG9vHJv1_Nmlg9XikMe-kH9_B_EV/s3200/DSC_2835.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixSBrFK1WZtdxz2hmh70w5nlB0MbHYeTKgudpVEzwaXIy12eQ2_E6vyOLDP45VqPJMDp_qQxp6K-lebZ10D7a30Q2JuaVK-YKe4lhb8kvc5hPZhIPlBG9vHJv1_Nmlg9XikMe-kH9_B_EV/s3200/DSC_2835.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This chestnut tree has grown a lot of side sprouts, for some reason. They will need to be cut off otherwise the tree will be outgrown by those surrounding it and it will lose the battle for light and die. </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMXXfQBatcapsNHHA5ulYbe_PGUOKHAAdqibtRksWywRabyqbsr-oGiKE8u8IL6oFLsxn1KHmI6TRS48OmW2rLNKQOjkKglx1NC7tHJttZ_AiMVUJvxGgGMd3wm6XyWG4A3D38VPbvLBN-/s3200/DSC_2836.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMXXfQBatcapsNHHA5ulYbe_PGUOKHAAdqibtRksWywRabyqbsr-oGiKE8u8IL6oFLsxn1KHmI6TRS48OmW2rLNKQOjkKglx1NC7tHJttZ_AiMVUJvxGgGMd3wm6XyWG4A3D38VPbvLBN-/s3200/DSC_2836.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is what happens when you let low side branches grow. Is it me, or does it look a bit like a rhino?</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8s2_kbyYlJ7rDCQBwN96IsVpEJZgzJcPh_-FGrW7EQMgQtDC60NNzhv4EWqzTUiIihjVPtPl6d65MODvL0eVkcuW0Z6uZO_NL6qhH9l3hoO-YArXzGOQDMYDNxvjtVsxiTxo-20TpxKft/s3200/DSC_2837.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj8s2_kbyYlJ7rDCQBwN96IsVpEJZgzJcPh_-FGrW7EQMgQtDC60NNzhv4EWqzTUiIihjVPtPl6d65MODvL0eVkcuW0Z6uZO_NL6qhH9l3hoO-YArXzGOQDMYDNxvjtVsxiTxo-20TpxKft/s3200/DSC_2837.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is squirrel damage. Grey squirrels are prolific here and I will have to control them if I want the coppice wood to be a success. </td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeMs6SWkc85F_iGnkDmrJDBkGF0oIJTgn7xqX5V_47BjGT6KKTX5uDgGpzcwXiv8_71KY15RVw998xpzc2OMPmX5ui4JTKQ2E4xagHGtuA0ivDZ2MAEtw6ayCZu56OQbBIwhGaxn75tZha/s3200/DSC_2838.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjeMs6SWkc85F_iGnkDmrJDBkGF0oIJTgn7xqX5V_47BjGT6KKTX5uDgGpzcwXiv8_71KY15RVw998xpzc2OMPmX5ui4JTKQ2E4xagHGtuA0ivDZ2MAEtw6ayCZu56OQbBIwhGaxn75tZha/s3200/DSC_2838.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Within the wood is this row of hazels. I'll probably coppice them next year as the new shoots they produce are extremely useful.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKRGrN3lG-NWMpGT5Rw4iocIrk7AzJ5fsTrPESGbFTd1KebjasLtsDhZVR2rR_DaoxDiZF5C4knA-4obGq49ZEtEjyUHrk0IPJN7wDMsYecsu-9mar1x3J8kS632Vgkx1nYs1ETbIb-Amh/s3200/DSC_2839.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKRGrN3lG-NWMpGT5Rw4iocIrk7AzJ5fsTrPESGbFTd1KebjasLtsDhZVR2rR_DaoxDiZF5C4knA-4obGq49ZEtEjyUHrk0IPJN7wDMsYecsu-9mar1x3J8kS632Vgkx1nYs1ETbIb-Amh/s3200/DSC_2839.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oak being strangled by ivy. </td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj30alwibprNkgs7xfWIZ0HO3F6B8ZiZPm0RxUGu-PYCc4I9vDXcFwRUjBHJrrTQziVvVwG3oFaRqyD3rcd4OxQiELhVUwSv75_m6WIGHlW6cH5_NaCmW2e0aV2yymZCrfRNiCXJ5pmV3Nr/s3200/DSC_2840.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj30alwibprNkgs7xfWIZ0HO3F6B8ZiZPm0RxUGu-PYCc4I9vDXcFwRUjBHJrrTQziVvVwG3oFaRqyD3rcd4OxQiELhVUwSv75_m6WIGHlW6cH5_NaCmW2e0aV2yymZCrfRNiCXJ5pmV3Nr/s3200/DSC_2840.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I've cut many of the ivy stems, so hopefully the old oak trees will be saved. </td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMYPGFEN8_Oxom_vm1ouH8XKQ5x-8XSWXhuha4p2tq1g16JBk4K6kP_WRYs_P4DZZsJWjb3BuIC5yS823qeQw11T8AevEq7gx09uN_owokGTs6vHwGE6dv0svdUNlLjhK6O8OXrh2X2Xb0/s3200/DSC_2841.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhMYPGFEN8_Oxom_vm1ouH8XKQ5x-8XSWXhuha4p2tq1g16JBk4K6kP_WRYs_P4DZZsJWjb3BuIC5yS823qeQw11T8AevEq7gx09uN_owokGTs6vHwGE6dv0svdUNlLjhK6O8OXrh2X2Xb0/s3200/DSC_2841.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBxbx3GuNGoMJQXOldtz0YypORmSNahZrMKhPQDwBAc0nqklfC-waLJvI0maIrNsRG2fLHg5B5nVx1HKYs4okhrZqzuDaOMXDvAv_ZWWEcmE02CiekWaZJGZkMdBWCPN-HUzLHNneg_269/s3200/DSC_2842.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBxbx3GuNGoMJQXOldtz0YypORmSNahZrMKhPQDwBAc0nqklfC-waLJvI0maIrNsRG2fLHg5B5nVx1HKYs4okhrZqzuDaOMXDvAv_ZWWEcmE02CiekWaZJGZkMdBWCPN-HUzLHNneg_269/s3200/DSC_2842.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I love the way hazel looks like rippling muscles.</td></tr>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvZP796xTIh-M1m-_xcavw_7ycMgTOmHldZsErdjeBZx_2rcfjKWnDKwY73XhFIN0gSkF8zEbFORkIPmte2ZY8ycaDnbYP4S_XaI9iOskRQu7vVi3U4XAyG0zH4jitYDVhfHklM2MhvHjC/s3200/DSC_2843.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgvZP796xTIh-M1m-_xcavw_7ycMgTOmHldZsErdjeBZx_2rcfjKWnDKwY73XhFIN0gSkF8zEbFORkIPmte2ZY8ycaDnbYP4S_XaI9iOskRQu7vVi3U4XAyG0zH4jitYDVhfHklM2MhvHjC/s3200/DSC_2843.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-sYPH5-vCaaqachErnF28srcvt5K58xHnF_2H0CoMSZxkkbXTN-AfPoDSCWmJhhdHlgJaZ5jw8VLD4iZe7zorbWkSTLe0xSFNAMPx4f0If22BATkUz4Lq0oEem-XvUlMh3cx9pXHwKqeS/s3200/DSC_2844.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh-sYPH5-vCaaqachErnF28srcvt5K58xHnF_2H0CoMSZxkkbXTN-AfPoDSCWmJhhdHlgJaZ5jw8VLD4iZe7zorbWkSTLe0xSFNAMPx4f0If22BATkUz4Lq0oEem-XvUlMh3cx9pXHwKqeS/s3200/DSC_2844.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some of the wood I cut, stacked up in different sized piles.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0JK8T9TMj1fLIZBu3SD1oJXUog4ZW-bI8yIzYBQGyirvs3M4fRvYrf1Y7gfJEd0vyvULRQetG0zSgEc50JfMN_7zHpk5eZ9izLrmTz03Zdh8Gx-n6Au1dQ7cq6t9in55NCxjBVOUDaSN-/s3200/DSC_2845.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0JK8T9TMj1fLIZBu3SD1oJXUog4ZW-bI8yIzYBQGyirvs3M4fRvYrf1Y7gfJEd0vyvULRQetG0zSgEc50JfMN_7zHpk5eZ9izLrmTz03Zdh8Gx-n6Au1dQ7cq6t9in55NCxjBVOUDaSN-/s3200/DSC_2845.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I'm experimenting with growing vegetables in the newly-coppiced forest area. These are potatoes coming up.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg43TPOTmfS_6_0lxnz0ojRPoEMG31mTovCWd6p5Q3_lEwDzTxI4Ph3iQr-m64ar70QUbOoeuV8ugVxFAEmiXyoLbFj7VTzYuh_nH_47oICtXlagw8-2WF1rqblEFiX61_4chfQOyRWsgTU/s3200/DSC_2847.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg43TPOTmfS_6_0lxnz0ojRPoEMG31mTovCWd6p5Q3_lEwDzTxI4Ph3iQr-m64ar70QUbOoeuV8ugVxFAEmiXyoLbFj7VTzYuh_nH_47oICtXlagw8-2WF1rqblEFiX61_4chfQOyRWsgTU/s3200/DSC_2847.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The coppiced cant. I moved all the remaining wood today - by hand. One of the joys of coppicing is that you don't need heavy machinery. It is a human-sized job.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2RUbwcn83bIaFBQhtgy5c5krIe58KlTP6PEw21lXqPkJO4rxhyh_3sWaTRH1EOJQ0NRWd2icOLTCJjyRpWW2PFdq7nuxBRFehiAtLEWU7cGatKVhRxspyZjV1_ep_TWLrTtefZ71FpaYq/s3200/DSC_2848.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj2RUbwcn83bIaFBQhtgy5c5krIe58KlTP6PEw21lXqPkJO4rxhyh_3sWaTRH1EOJQ0NRWd2icOLTCJjyRpWW2PFdq7nuxBRFehiAtLEWU7cGatKVhRxspyZjV1_ep_TWLrTtefZ71FpaYq/s3200/DSC_2848.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I have built hedges with the brash to deter deer and act as a store for firewood. Actually, most of this will get turned into charcoal in a couple of years, but for now the birds seem to love it and robins are busy building nests in it.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQcOcMhWlxJJilLBPo_TQpopvmm-5ACOSoetGIJIZUX9sO1ZykcN-UFG-vGOAn83B6nj4dGa9OHXOLaiYXrOvESfbK318OocIq7ulRs0T_r0LJLN5Mdohz-fi-ZCiNRPF8HCl2UNqbfknQ/s3200/DSC_2849.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQcOcMhWlxJJilLBPo_TQpopvmm-5ACOSoetGIJIZUX9sO1ZykcN-UFG-vGOAn83B6nj4dGa9OHXOLaiYXrOvESfbK318OocIq7ulRs0T_r0LJLN5Mdohz-fi-ZCiNRPF8HCl2UNqbfknQ/s3200/DSC_2849.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Some of these are HEAVY. Still, being on a slope, I just rolled 'em down it.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoVKsxzvsMRtj4SUmcUViZnu1Vn7qhu5rk_CVBPBpxK6MvJH_MzptFl58cFsXlGENVYzFX-Z-UGQ2aYJbfM6uRC8yfijCeJZV9zd_hN9ASLI8wFmxHnnX59i3pBYxUAK_sdn7O4Rw8tGCA/s3200/DSC_2850.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjoVKsxzvsMRtj4SUmcUViZnu1Vn7qhu5rk_CVBPBpxK6MvJH_MzptFl58cFsXlGENVYzFX-Z-UGQ2aYJbfM6uRC8yfijCeJZV9zd_hN9ASLI8wFmxHnnX59i3pBYxUAK_sdn7O4Rw8tGCA/s3200/DSC_2850.jpg" height="400" width="265" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A lone chestnut standard amidst its fallen comrades. I wonder, does it feel survivor guilt?</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZZDTRNClkfR-T7sj5f26SmqKS9lYJxF-VOcAP_PtjBfM7b2_jc0nK0ViQLOxojVWNcnuiC7bRV2Z4RsuUjhP81yKaCdyTc7kNFu6ND4jRfqxcqgZTTR7Jpem7WL0s2fJDTeOlE-yGclGd/s3200/DSC_2851.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiZZDTRNClkfR-T7sj5f26SmqKS9lYJxF-VOcAP_PtjBfM7b2_jc0nK0ViQLOxojVWNcnuiC7bRV2Z4RsuUjhP81yKaCdyTc7kNFu6ND4jRfqxcqgZTTR7Jpem7WL0s2fJDTeOlE-yGclGd/s3200/DSC_2851.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I have more wood than I know what to do with. Luckily, a couple of buyers have already stepped forward for some of it.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Another pile.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgisN9lluVz0EnbrN3KnlaNzIPJD_1PZzIgmYGbIc6TRd816EcAN1K0X9n6asZb7uDmz0Dfkx561ZKJJbgGIj2zeSYuT53C0oYoU62lMG4OD1dfgp50boXBiULFI4_gFOvE4BXHiF4Vld3a/s3200/DSC_2855.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgisN9lluVz0EnbrN3KnlaNzIPJD_1PZzIgmYGbIc6TRd816EcAN1K0X9n6asZb7uDmz0Dfkx561ZKJJbgGIj2zeSYuT53C0oYoU62lMG4OD1dfgp50boXBiULFI4_gFOvE4BXHiF4Vld3a/s3200/DSC_2855.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">During the extreme 'worst in 250 years' storms of the winter, I lost only one tree. This was an old hawthorn that was covered in ivy. I chopped it up and it will be fed into our wood burner next winter.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of the bird boxes that my daughters made.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Orange blossom. Yes, that's right.</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Baby oranges. I also have lemons, olives and avocados - although they'll need to go in the poly tunnel next winter.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkMTj_npcVcKlx97EJRhK0gwJMpcm4LneBLduPnkFvsJgh46up-UknhJnvIuESL49DiprEsnpoP6OHM_vtTVx7X93FCUNVnxjfX5exhCKTple2tyysvQRcPRSZqm-ON5tDtDyoOINxon7-/s3200/DSC_2859.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgkMTj_npcVcKlx97EJRhK0gwJMpcm4LneBLduPnkFvsJgh46up-UknhJnvIuESL49DiprEsnpoP6OHM_vtTVx7X93FCUNVnxjfX5exhCKTple2tyysvQRcPRSZqm-ON5tDtDyoOINxon7-/s3200/DSC_2859.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The new steps. I've sprinkled wildflower seed on the (probably) sterile soil, so soon this should be a riot of colour.</td></tr>
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-11013636302617517832014-02-17T02:57:00.002-08:002014-02-17T04:47:49.131-08:00Storming Ahead<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia3JXIrLMVww8PcoOgAEcNBMc8U8qBBXW2dtkwtUJgRsJFyiMUjYyFHodV2l_C03Gm8jsnOOeAplgXY25lJjyXBHn8Z7Yh0WvUsKZMzUulGXKHrJaQfz6liHJMVP9JqAQdRNjutnU1ce_k/s1600/1799111_10152185017344350_806828227_o.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia3JXIrLMVww8PcoOgAEcNBMc8U8qBBXW2dtkwtUJgRsJFyiMUjYyFHodV2l_C03Gm8jsnOOeAplgXY25lJjyXBHn8Z7Yh0WvUsKZMzUulGXKHrJaQfz6liHJMVP9JqAQdRNjutnU1ce_k/s1600/1799111_10152185017344350_806828227_o.jpg" height="265" width="400" /></a></div>
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Work has been intermittent at Fox Wood over the last couple of months. The savage storms that have lashed southern Britain and Ireland since before Christmas have not allowed for much work to be done at all! Luckily there has been little damage beyond a couple of ivy-choked hawthorns being blown over, a small pear tree being snapped in half by the wind and the almost complete loss of the silage plastic I was using to kill off a section of grass in preparation for clover sowing. A stream has appeared on the land, seemingly coming up out of a patch of boggy undergrowth.<br />
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Elsewhere has not been so lucky. Fox Wood is very close to the small Cornish harbour of Porthleven, which has taken a terrible battering. With ferocious waves rolling in off the Atlantic the usually protected harbour was overwhelmed and the defensive bulwarks were smashed to pieces. Several fishermen lost their boats but luckily nobody was killed.<br />
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Nobody in these parts has ever seen anything quite like it before. They say the weather has not been this bad for 250 years, but what they really mean is that records only began 250 years ago. There has been almost constant rain for nearly two months now, with only the occasional day here and there of calm weather. Yesterday the sun came out - although today it is back to 'normal' - here is the view from my window as I write these words:<br />
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Although you can't make it out from the image, there is a buoy between here and St Michael's Mount (the island) which recorded a number of almost 75 feet high waves (that's about 22 metres) last week.<br />
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This is unprecedented and the entire coastline has suffered devastation as a result. Dead seals, dolphins and even whales have been found smashed against the rocks on nearby beaches. This is what it looks like close up:<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Penzance promenade during a recent storm</td></tr>
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This ongoing devastation has reignited the debate about climate change here in the UK. The current government takes a dim view of anything to do with the environment. Indeed, the minister responsible for the environment says that climate change is unimportant and that people should not get so 'emotional' about it. I wonder how the people of Somerset feel about that?<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A flooded Somerset, seen from above</td></tr>
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I was in nearby Devon yesterday and the local newspaper had the above picture on the front page with the headline <i>Welcome to the Future</i>. This is the place where the government wants to build a new nuclear power station.<br />
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Anyway, so far the storms are mostly proving to be scary and expensive rather than deadly. There is lots of talk of abandoning parts of the coastline to nature, which makes me all the happier that both Fox Wood and my house are safely inland and up hills.<br />
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Despite the almost apocalyptic weather various things have been happening at Fox Wood. I have decided that I am going to use the woodland as an education centre to teach permaculture and coppice crafts. This will no doubt take a few years to reach fruition but I know the land well enough now to decide on the best place for a building, and in due course I'll apply through the correct legal channels to construct something that can be used as a place to teach. Given that I'm short on cash these days it will necessarily have to be built out of whatever is available on site - which luckily is a huge amount. I'm thinking of cordwood walls and cob, for the main. Luckily there is someone just down the road who has already built such a dwelling so I'll take my designs from it.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYcIixnoYq4b-1CzwYd124JPrRE4Zt5l3D79JmKBMpvRBBx_ikIrhC98VXaF9faj4UpyhM8ylrx_yM_QTw4Ga-50oPJQvfosrOnPswHZRCbNIoKXtzHMa1TAY_JP2b0gWepr06qyzWuuRC/s1600/hobbit-house-cornwall.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYcIixnoYq4b-1CzwYd124JPrRE4Zt5l3D79JmKBMpvRBBx_ikIrhC98VXaF9faj4UpyhM8ylrx_yM_QTw4Ga-50oPJQvfosrOnPswHZRCbNIoKXtzHMa1TAY_JP2b0gWepr06qyzWuuRC/s1600/hobbit-house-cornwall.jpg" height="249" width="640" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The hobbit house at Plan It Earth - see <a href="http://www.plan-itearth.org.uk/roundhouse-holidays" target="_blank">here</a> for more info</td></tr>
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I have decided to create a peaceful garden to accompany the centre and cleared a good section of overgrown woodland with nothing but a pruning saw and some loppers. I'm beginning to love my new pruning saw as it is such an effective tool that requires little effort to use. There were quite a few dead hawthorn trees in there, and giant bramble bushes, so I came away with plenty of scratches and cuts! But the land is flat here and ideal for a garden.<br />
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Next winter I'll cut down most of the trees in here and let the rabbits nibble on the new shoots. Instead, I'll plant a few more fruit trees and surround the whole area with a hedge. The reason for the hedge is that there's a public right of way running right alongside this section of the land so it will just be there for some peace and seclusion.<br />
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Myself and the kids built some rustic steps down into the new 'garden'. Not bad for three hours' work using just stones, hazel rods and chestnut branches!<br />
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In two weeks I am taking delivery of about 150 trees. 100 of these are Italian alders, which grow fast and will act as windbreaks around the land to protect the more delicate fruit trees. They are great injectors of nitrogen into the soil too, which is very important at this stage of the design. There are also some walnut trees, which are slightly toxic to other plants so I'll have to figure out an area for them that won't interfere too much with the rest of the plant community. The other 50 or so trees are for edible hedging, and are a mixture of rose hips, crab apples, hawthorn, damson and other species, long enough to make a 20m hedge. Furthermore, I've planted about another 25 trees, including hazel, fast-growing poplar (to shield the future poly tunnel because neighbours are concerned about 'visual intrusion'), dogwood, common alder, silver birch (for firewood) and willow.<br />
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My most urgent task at the moment is to put up fencing to protect the coppice stools from rabbits. This is quite expensive and the weather has prevented me from doing too much about it, but I'll have to do it in the next couple of weeks or so. This has to be dug into the ground to stop the rabbits burrowing underneath.<br />
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Speaking of coppicing, in the newly-exposed soil around the tree stumps I'm randomly planting potatoes and vegetable seeds - beetroots, maize, beans, pumpkins, carrots, marrows and butternut squashes. It occurred to me that I might be onto something here and I've never heard of anyone else doing this. Here is 25 years of leaf mulch, which has produced some of the richest soil imaginable, that is suddenly open to sunlight. Furthermore, it will be protected from rabbits by the fencing. I reckon there will be a couple of years before the new tree growth begins to block out the light again, and in the meantime I'm hoping that this will allow for some great (and very easy) no-dig vegetable gardening to go on. The random nature of the planting will protect against invasion by predator insects, which love groups of crops sown closely together. That's the plan anyway.<br />
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I've also begun inoculating sawn-up logs with mushroom spores - oyster mushrooms, shiitakes, pearl and chicken of the woods. The logs need to be kept damp - no problem in this climate!<br />
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I managed to sell some of my cut wood from this year's coppice - not much, but it's an exciting start! I'm beginning to keep notes on how much the land is producing. Everything should be included in it, from wood and seedlings, to hedge berries, rabbits and pounds of apples. The reason I'm starting to do this is a growing suspicion that in the not-too-distant future landowners will have to justify their land and prove to government officials that they are doing everything they can to make it productive and not just using it for leisure.<br />
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I recently watched all of the episodes of the BBC series '<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eaQr7JJ1ms" target="_blank">Victorian Farm</a>' and went on to watch '<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G6tVEo5wAP4" target="_blank">Wartime Farm</a>' - I'd highly recommend both series as they are free to watch on YouTube. It then hit me that a financial storm will likely render the UK unable to purchase chemical fertiliser and oil, meaning the threat of widespread hunger. When this happened during the last war, all farmers were immediately placed under the watchful eye of the 'War Ag' i.e. inspectors who ensured landowners were doing everything they could to produce as much food and wood as possible. Failure to make the grade meant confiscation of your land. In one case, a farmer who refused to cooperate was shot dead by police following a siege.<br />
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But since the last war the population has more than doubled, the skills to work the land without chemicals have evaporated, a massive area has been concreted over by urban sprawl and the fertility of the topsoil has plummeted. And now we are also losing large amounts of low-lying fertile land to flooding. The only reason people are not worried by all this is because there is this false notion floating around that we will always be able to buy whatever we want on the so-called global market. To me that sounds like a risky proposition.<br />
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Officialdom loves documentation, so from here on in I'll be taking notes of exactly what the inputs and outputs are at Fox Wood. After all, I wouldn't want the land to be placed in the hands of a bureaucrat, ploughed up and planted with potatoes to feed starving city folk. This, to me, is a far more likely scenario than the imagined gangs of thugs who will be roaming the countryside looking for food.<br />
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I'm just thinking ahead and it pays to spot potential predators lurking in bushes.<br />
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-38985624121698668482014-01-16T04:38:00.000-08:002014-01-17T23:19:54.511-08:00Coppice!<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A cleanly-cut stool with a ring of moss</td></tr>
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Last week I cut the first section of coppice in the woodland. Having no experience of this before I employed the help of a friend who is a <a href="http://www.futuretracks.co.uk/" target="_blank">seasoned coppicer</a> to see me through the first season and make sure I was doing things correctly.<br />
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What is coppicing? A lot of people are not familiar with this practice which has been employed for thousands of years in Britain and other temperate regions, so an explanation is in order. Coppicing is simply the act of cutting down certain species of hardwood trees, such as oak, hazel, chestnut and ash, while they are still young enough to regenerate. This is done in the winter, when the ‘life force’ of the trees has retreated down into the root systems. By cutting off the trunks at between 3 and 6 inches the tree stumps will start sprouting shoots when Spring returns. These shoots are then protected and allowed to grow, and in another 12 years I will be back to cut them off again - although next time there will be four or five stems instead of one.<br />
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When I first bought Fox Wood just over a year ago, it was an abandoned coppice wood with brambles growing everywhere and some of the trees in a derelict state. The woods were planted about 25 years ago when it was part of the local estate - the Trevarno Estate - which was a big local landowner with family ties stretching back hundreds of years. Locals say it used to be full of pheasants which ‘gentlemen’ would periodically come along and shoot as they were flushed out by drivers. The estate went bust and was sold to a Russian oligarch (so I’m told) and the small parcels of woodland were sold off to individual buyers. Fox Wood is about six acres, with a two acre field attached. You can see it shaded in blue of the Google map image below.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A view of Fox Wood from above</td></tr>
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Work has not yet finished on the coppice this year. The next thing I need to do is make some tracks for a horse to pull the logs into the field. Until I know exactly what to do with the wood I need to keep the trunks as long as is reasonably possible. The maxim is ‘Keep it as long as you can for as long as you can’. If I cut it all into short lengths I might miss up the opportunity of selling it as building materials. A friend knows someone with a horse trained to extract wood, so hopefully I will be able to borrow it for a day. <br />
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Once the wood has been extracted then I need to surround the whole area with fencing. This will be quite a big job and pricey too. I have never seen a deer in the area but locals say there are a few muntjac (a small Chinese deer) roaming around. If a deer were to graze on the new shoots in the Spring then this would be disastrous and might result in the death of all the trees. Therefore deer fencing has to be erected. <br />
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Rabbits are another problem. There are hundreds of them in and around the woodland and so I will need to put up a rabbit-proof fence and dig it into the ground all around. Unfortunately, the problem doesn’t stop there: there are rabbits actually living inside the area that will be fenced off. Thus, I need to contact a local known as ‘the ferret man’. He will come over with his ferret and put it down the rabbit holes. The rabbits will then be chased out and into nets, where they will meet their end. I’m told he will accept payment in rabbits, so it won’t cost me anything.</div>
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Unfortunately, due to laws preventing people from living in the woods they manage it is necessary to erect high fences to protect the new coppice. In times past the woodlander would have been able to erect his bender within the coppice and thus keep away any deer, which have an acute sense of smell. I’m told they are scared off by the smell of human urine and so will be encouraging any people working in the woods to head to the boundary when they feel the call of nature.<br />
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The reason the coppice is cut in large sections is to let in light. If we were just to cut a few trees every here and there the canopy would soon close over the stumps and no light would be available for the new shoots. They would die. By cutting half an acre at a time light is allowed to flood in and all of the stumps can regenerate at the same rate. To most people it looks like environmental devastation - but in fact it is quite the opposite. The trees have been planted relatively close together to encourage them to compete for the light. This makes them grow straight, and it also makes them grow quickly.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The half acre has been clear cut to allow light in</td></tr>
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The actual work of coppicing was done with chainsaws. In the right hands these are invaluable tools and can save a huge amount of time. I expect chainsaws to be used even when oil is in short supply, but eventually their use will probably fizzle out and people will have to revert to the old ways of cutting wood. The two-man bow saw is the best tool in this respect, and I’ve heard reports that they can be almost as fast a chainsaw - although you’d have to have a very fit and strong individual on each end of it!<br />
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When Spring comes the coppiced area will be covered with an abundance of wild flowers as long-dormant seeds suddenly find themselves with a supply of sunlight. This will attract a lot of different species of insect, including many butterflies and moths, which in turn will attract birds and other predators. I’ve read that coppiced stands often provide refuge for several species of rare butterfly, bee and bird. I’ll be keeping my eye on this and will post some more pictures in the spring. Here's a picture of what it should look like:</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A coppiced section of woodland in spring - image from www.wildgardens.co.uk</td></tr>
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In twelve years, when I come to coppice this section again, there will be five times as much work as each stump will have sprouted multiple trunks. In their uncut state the young trees are called maidens and their trunks can often be twisted and gnarly. The new growth will be a lot straighter and easier to work with, but for now I have a lot of maiden trunks to put in the wood store. What will I do with them? <br />
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Selling them as long logs for construction is the easiest way to make money out of them - but also the least profitable. The more processing I can do, the more I will earn. As a bare minimum I will be cutting them into lengths approximately six feet long and then splitting them lengthways with a tool called a froe. A froe is a bit like an axe that you hammer down through the grain of the wood. These split pieces of chestnut can be sold or used as fence palings. Myself and another woodland neighbour are building a large coop in which to keep chickens, so quite a few of these will be used for that. </div>
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But generally speaking, most of the wood from this year’s coppice will be used for construction projects on my own land, including raised beds, a wood store, a compost toilet and Hugelkultur beds. <br />
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Other pieces will be sold to various local greenwood craftspeople I’ve got to know since we started up a coppice and woodland skills network in the local area (more on that in another post). Some will be sawn up as logs for our own use and for sale. With the price of natural gas and electricity increasing so much, many people are installing wood burners to heat their homes, and the price of logs is rising in response. It’s something of a waste to use a high quality wood such as chestnut or oak for fuel, so I will try to minimise this and use only the small diameter branches. I’ll probably also make bundles of faggots, which will burn well in our new wood burner that is due to be connected to the central heating system in our house this summer. I will also be making charcoal with many of the offcuts using an old oil drum later in the year.<br />
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Wood is also a de facto currency. I have many offers of people willing to work on the land for a day in return for a car boot full of logs. The woodland effectively pays for itself. What's more, I've planted around 150 young trees, including a few birch which will be used for firewood and making birch sap wine. I will have a further 300 oak saplings planted from seed to use in hedges or sell to other people establishing woodlands.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Fox Wood, as it lies in the landscape of west Cornwall</td></tr>
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Whatever wood is left will sit and season in the woodshed. I haven’t built the woodshed yet, but it’s on my list of jobs to do in 2014. One of the many good things about chestnut and oak is that the natural tannins in the wood preserve it for up to 50 years without the need to treat it with chemicals. I can build my woodshed at leisure in the spring or summer. In the meantime I will continue to learn more greenwood skills so that I can increase the value of my wood products. Ben Law, in his excellent book <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Woodland-Way-Permaculture-Sustainable/dp/1856230090" target="_blank"><i>The Woodland Way</i></a>, says that you can increase the value of your wood 800% by making bespoke green wood furniture, gates and other things. This is something I fully intend to do. I’ve already been taught how to make a long bow (see below) - so making my own shave horse is another job for this year. <br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Greg works a piece of ash with an axe to make a long bow</td></tr>
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Working in a woodland setting has to be one of the most enjoyable ways to make a living. It seems incredible that this time last year I was sitting at a desk in a city and dreaming of doing what I am doing now. I see coppicing as one of the most sustainable ways to make a living. Woodland can be bought quite cheaply, compared to agricultural land, and trees require very little maintenance; they just grow! In today’s industrial system woodland is undervalued quite substantially and is priced in terms of the extractable timber. This represents quite an opportunity for anyone looking to make a sustainable living. Even a patch of old spruce or fir is packed with opportunities. The conifers can be cut down and used as construction materials or firewood while you plant up the cleared area with broadleaf species - and it doesn't need to be that big, two or three acres or more should be plenty (see <a href="http://www.woodlands.co.uk/buying-a-wood/north-wales/coed-rhoslan-high-moor-wood/" target="_blank">this</a>, for example). And despite what I wrote above, there are ways in which you can live perfectly legally in your woodland. You’ll have to be quite inventive to start with, but the law will either have to change or it will break down soon enough as planning departments struggle with cutbacks and are overwhelmed with people inventively living on their own land. <br />
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There can’t be many easier ways to capture the sun’s rays and turn them into energy and useful products. Furthermore, by clearing glades you can plant forest gardens to grow annual vegetables, fruit and nut trees and many other things that will provide for a subsistence living. People are an important part of the woodland ecology and I look forward to the day when the woods are filled with people again, harvesting timber, making products and burning charcoal. That is truly a future to look forward to.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Woodlanders and crafts people get-together at Fox Wood to share a bowl of hot chilli and a jug of hot cider</td></tr>
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-87546684061981836672013-09-30T03:29:00.004-07:002013-09-30T03:29:57.475-07:00Autumnal Musings<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Autumn has arrived at Fox Wood bringing with it cooler and wetter weather and causing all sorts of life forms to die off and others to emerge out of the moist soil.<br />
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I've been quite busy over the summer, travelling around Europe and moving house, so the amount of time I have been able to dedicate to Fox Wood has not been as much as I would have liked. Even the pond is starting to put on a new green growth.<br />
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Down in the forest, things are emerging from the ground, like these puff balls.<br />
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That's not the only type of fungus to emerge - plenty of these are growing in the field …<br />
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The wood is quiet and misty, like somewhere from another time.<br />
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It won't be quiet for long, in a couple of months I'll be coming in with my chainsaw to coppice the first half acre in a 12 years rotation cycle. Don't worry, the trees will grow back, and it is good for the wildlife.<br />
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I found this bottle. A badger must have dug it up and left it lying around in the wood. It was covered in soil and must be at least 100 years old. Inside it a small plant has started to grow. It's a message from the past.<br />
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The reason for my last visit was to collect berries. Because of the rampant growth of brambles we have thousands - millions probably - of blackberries this year. Some of them ended up in a pie last night.<br />
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There are also sloes aplenty. They have now been popped into a gin bottle with some sugar. By Christmas I'll have a bottle of sloe gin.<br />
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Autumn is a time of plenty. I haven't had any fruit from the young trees this year, but it will take them a while to get established. Perhaps next year I will get some. Unfortunately some of them have been attacked by rabbits. This is the peach tree.<br />
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The other trees are doing well. This one is a carob tree that I grew from a seed I picked up in Spain. I don't know if it will survive the winter, but it is doing okay for now.<br />
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Plenty of other trees are being planted too. I'm starting an oak nursery and aim to plant 500 a year. These are the first few, but the acorns won't be ready for another couple of weeks.<br />
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It's another use for the soil I'm digging out of the pond. As for the field itself, you might remember it was covered in thistles for most of the year. This proved to be a hit with the local bee and butterfly populations, with masses of each getting nectar from the thistle flowers. Now, however, the thistles have died off and I have cut them down to the ground. They are making an unusual mulch.<br />
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The chestnut trees are laden with nuts. They look to be pretty healthy …<br />
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And the silage plastic I laid down is doing its job of killing off the grass in readiness for next year's initial planting of ground cover - one of the first steps in turning this field into an edible forest. It doesn't look pretty … but it will do!<br />
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-16148551256638971002013-06-22T02:55:00.000-07:002013-06-22T04:55:14.087-07:00Can you dig it?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The basic shape of the pond</td></tr>
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I figured out a while ago that if I was going to be growing produce in our field then I would need a source of irrigation water. I looked into the cost of getting a bore hole drilled, and although it would be in the region of a couple of thousand pounds (just for the hole, without any pumping equipment) I figured it was a necessary expense.<br />
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Then I read Joel Salatin's book, The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer, and changed my mind about drilling down into rocks that, naturally, should act as a sealed off water source. After all, water is one thing that we don't lack in these increasingly soggy isles. And so I decided to dig a pond.<br />
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It would have to be quite big. And going by the permaculture principle of trying to find at least three uses for everything, I realised that installing a pond would provide the following:<br />
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<li>Irrigation water for the fruit trees, poly tunnel and flowers</li>
<li>A source of drinking water for local wildlife</li>
<li>Fish </li>
<li>A place for ducks to live (on a little island) which will eat the slugs </li>
<li>An added feature to increase the biodiversity and somewhere that threatened newts can call home</li>
<li>A source of drinking water for humans (although it would need purifying first)</li>
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Six uses was good enough for me to justify hiring some earth moving plant … but the recent rains had made the access track muddy and I had no idea how to get it up there … and so I started digging by hand. Freelance work is taking a bit of a holiday at the moment, so I had a week and a spade and a mattock - what more did I need?</div>
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I had also planned to build the retaining wall out of local stone. Again, I would need to spend money on buying rocks, getting a cement mixer and a generator and some bags of cement. But as I started digging it made sense to pile up the sod into a retaining bank. I'm making it good and thick, and will plant things in it so the roots hold it together (once the vegetation has rotted and the whole thing has settled down and compacted). This pond keeps getting cheaper and cheaper!</div>
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Alas, I can't see any way round buying a decent pond liner, but so be it. The plan is to construct a wood store with a sloping roof right above the pond area (you don't need planning permission for a building with no walls - see picture below for what I'm planning), which will catch the water and replenish the pond. It rains pretty much all year round here, so I don't anticipate there being any problems. Given that the land is all sloping, the poly tunnel and fruit trees are down the hill a bit - and a cast iron Victorian hand-cranked pump I bought on eBay will get the water flowing when needed.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I'm hoping to build something like this one, which is at the Eden Project</td></tr>
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Aside from digging the pond I have been clearing brambles with a sickle, and mulching around the trees.</div>
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My method is to raid the local cardboard recycling banks at Tesco and spread them out on the ground around the trees. Underneath the cardboard is all the kitchen waste and scraps that I can accumulate. On top of the cardboard I'm spreading a load of sticks and then piling on soil (full of worms) from the pond basin. The result is a kind of mini hugel bed mulch which is spreading slowly but surely and should be ready next year for planting up with some ground nitrogen-fixing plants, such as clover and strawberries.<br />
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Under the one above is a slimy mush of coffee grounds, fish heads, mouldy rice pudding, vegetable peelings, tea bags and curry. I have temporarily given up on my wormery because of the swarm of fruit flies it is producing (which fly into neighbour's windows). So this is the new method of 'disposing of' organic waste.<br />
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The rest of the field has become a forest of thistles - some as tall as me. As such it has become a wildlife haven, with thousands of bees and butterflies swarming all over it. I was recently asked if I'd be interested in having somebody else's bee hives up there, but on balance I'm going to say no. Honey bees are economic producers and I'm not overly concerned with their welfare. Wild bees, such as the many different species of bumble bee, are severely threatened and yet hardly anyone is talking about them - even though they may be acting as keystone species. That's why Fox Wood will remain a wild bee zone.<br />
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<b>The vegetable patch</b><br />
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This is continuing to expand, as you can see above. Whenever I have some spare cash in my pocket I buy another 10m of chicken wire and strip back another patch of turf. I'm digging them over and adding rock dust, which is apparently an organic fertiliser (and an impulse buy!). I now have growing:<br />
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<li>Regular peas</li>
<li>Chick peas</li>
<li>Carrots</li>
<li>Onions</li>
<li>Purple sprouting broccoli</li>
<li>Kale</li>
<li>Garlic</li>
<li>Chilli peppers</li>
<li>Red sweet peppers</li>
<li>Gooseberries</li>
<li>Blackberries</li>
<li>Another kind of berry whose name I can't remember (said to be a 'super berry'!)</li>
<li>Pumpkins</li>
<li>Lettuce</li>
<li>Sweetcorn</li>
<li>Strawberries</li>
<li>Figs</li>
<li>Rhubarb</li>
<li>Artichokes</li>
<li>Guji berries</li>
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There was also a melon plant, but slugs ate it. </div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">An embryonic peach</td></tr>
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<b>Down in the forest …</b></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The chestnut trees are planted in rows to make harvesting easier</td></tr>
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I have had some very welcome news! I invited Greg from <a href="http://www.futuretracks.co.uk/" target="_blank">Future Tracks</a> to come and visit for a morning and assess what I had. Greg is a proper woodlander, a skilled coppice and greenwood worker who also runs survival courses and is a green building builder (more on that later).</div>
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When Greg and I walked around the forest it's fair to say that his mouth fell open in something like reverential awe. My inexpert opinion of the wood was that it was 'okay' but Greg seemed to think I had wildly underestimated its potential. Whoever planted up the wood, he said, clearly knew what they were doing. This is what I learned that day:<br />
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<li>I have a perfectly planted and spaced wood that is 90% chestnut, and 10% oak and hazel, with a few ash trees</li>
<li>The chestnut wood is highly prized locally for things such as fence posts and building. It is a hardwood that contains tannins, stopping it from rotting when placed in the ground, and vastly superior to the cheap imported wood (often from China and the tropics) which has flooded the UK in recent decades and is now falling to bits having proved to be a false economy.</li>
<li>The trees are perfectly placed for easy cutting and extraction. When one is cut down, four new ones will replace it within a decade.</li>
<li>There is a long row of huge poplars which will need to be taken out a couple at a time to permit the chestnut to be felled. This will need to be done by a tree surgeon, but the size of the trees mean they will be worth a good sum.</li>
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He outlined a plan for coppicing and will help me during my first season of work (next winter). The wood will be divided up into 12 zones of a half acre each, starting at the eastern end and working west. Each year one zone will be worked and the felled trees dragged out by local shire horses and stored in the woodshed for curing. The cut zone will then be fenced off from deer while the new shoots form, and we can expect to see a profusion of wildlife take over as long dormant seeds on the forest floor germinate, attracting many rare butterflies and birds. I will then return to this zone in 12 years, when the carefully managed shoots will have grown into 20 foot high trees, and the whole things starts again.</div>
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Greg also had some other money-making ideas for me. He suggested being an oak tree farmer! Well, this certainly appeals to my Druid soul, the idea of collecting and germinating hundreds of acorns each year and then selling them on after two or three years. The same could be done with the chestnuts - that is the ones that I don't sell to the local shops during harvest time in the autumn.</div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The forest floor is currently covered in this … not sure what it is</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Elderflowers, growing in one of the darkest recesses of the woodland which I plan to turn into ...</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wine! This is my first attempt at making my own wine. Here is my rhubarb wine, and also a strawberry one, which is fermenting merrily</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhukcsQGkdElJIxrFzasLgYInyWU89KsOLdKdVF-L8gwuGLIj5ke6azLlLSK9vQeJeotibP8cKXEOO4DYBNM1MlY0eh-3VLSEBuiJNFYky1KLwyQz2t8L7jtnt1WMv3XlieCT75LQ0iUXpE/s1600/IMG_1072.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhukcsQGkdElJIxrFzasLgYInyWU89KsOLdKdVF-L8gwuGLIj5ke6azLlLSK9vQeJeotibP8cKXEOO4DYBNM1MlY0eh-3VLSEBuiJNFYky1KLwyQz2t8L7jtnt1WMv3XlieCT75LQ0iUXpE/s400/IMG_1072.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hogweed unfurling</td></tr>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The row of poplars, probably planted originally to protect the young forest from stiff southwesterly winds</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZD5M-IzxFETJLMGGeP8NcDsdmeD8D1CHxllGzn887ReQd9EVoEpqT6_0tNg45IaUnaQvq9R7RQMyGDX2oVNFx2LnS1a9HpZCet7Ck1J6lxXq5HiiODrN7BM6NSUzeXwiXFDqnAPDdb5FE/s1600/IMG_1062.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZD5M-IzxFETJLMGGeP8NcDsdmeD8D1CHxllGzn887ReQd9EVoEpqT6_0tNg45IaUnaQvq9R7RQMyGDX2oVNFx2LnS1a9HpZCet7Ck1J6lxXq5HiiODrN7BM6NSUzeXwiXFDqnAPDdb5FE/s400/IMG_1062.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A passage of oaks which I rescued from encroaching brambles. The oaks, I now realise, lead one down into the forest, beckoning to the curious </td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJBvWfH54RAZUulNWYHRHqS4NXay6Mb_dk2gH-xsl6Gb8SGkWepMhbWUG0NUi16U8TA0McUTgHkH1tFNdwmhm6JEAvuKLR9Lm_jBXIuBnJQ4nBlmZNj2oeS34fV6fRRvB-QbzSfOUv7uXx/s1600/IMG_1071.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJBvWfH54RAZUulNWYHRHqS4NXay6Mb_dk2gH-xsl6Gb8SGkWepMhbWUG0NUi16U8TA0McUTgHkH1tFNdwmhm6JEAvuKLR9Lm_jBXIuBnJQ4nBlmZNj2oeS34fV6fRRvB-QbzSfOUv7uXx/s400/IMG_1071.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This was our Christmas tree that was in our flat in Denmark for three years. It seemed to die when planted out, but magically came back to life recently. </td></tr>
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That's all from Fox Wood for now - happy Solstice everyone!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqYL4K9k3_fygRUvfv6kV05EFY7AKFXZnLvkE36hHo_bPXg1bnJ7uNLV-Lwh5sI6aTc0IShRUggkCC-WXhP-h2RdXhHc7ZIhBNVrffMZTtIJDwOhkdkgeWFxSxgMuyqX8fCryOM74p8r11/s1600/cornwall+stone+circle.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqYL4K9k3_fygRUvfv6kV05EFY7AKFXZnLvkE36hHo_bPXg1bnJ7uNLV-Lwh5sI6aTc0IShRUggkCC-WXhP-h2RdXhHc7ZIhBNVrffMZTtIJDwOhkdkgeWFxSxgMuyqX8fCryOM74p8r11/s400/cornwall+stone+circle.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A stone circle not too far from Fox Wood</td></tr>
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com13tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-56239892267630496362013-06-06T13:07:00.002-07:002013-06-06T13:43:09.667-07:00Earth Restoration Operative in Action<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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It's a funny thing to note that six months ago I was spending an unhealthy amount of time both reading and writing about peak oil, climate change and the catabolic collapse of industrial civilisation, and yet now that I've actually started to take some kind of action I barely have time for either.<br />
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Summer seems to have come in Cornwall, like someone flicking a switch. One day it was cold and wet, the next it was burning sun - and it has stayed that way for the last ten days. I have been spending my days lugging wheelbarrows full of rocks, digging holes, cutting wood and clearing brambles, to say the least.<br />
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I've been thinking a lot more deeply about how this patch of land can work as a permaculture project. It's evolving slowly, which is how it should do. My aim is to vastly improve the biodiversity and soil quality of this patch of land that has somehow fallen under the orbit of my control, and at the same time manage the surrounding woodland in a sustainable way. By synchronising with nature's rhythms and listening to the land I hope to be able to create a harmonious place that is a refuge from the industrially ravaged land that surrounds it, perhaps providing a place of resilience for my family and valued friends in the process.<br />
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Although I'm still doing some copywriting and translation work to keep financially afloat, I am able to spend at least three days a week working on the land. The last two weekends we have stayed in the caravan and the children are getting attuned to living without TVs, iPads and all the other things that 21st century kids are supposed to crave.<br />
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Here's a bit of an update of sorts of what is going on at Fox Wood.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_SjboRFTxjBytJb5zrspyPGLVAewQDwV7HMAlgPHE1y4mG3vUzZ2zFyxWk1UWlPHEh6pywflUP8JZIiSgXRI0Fj5YOxO-CqaFZIggAcXEepCGbtkl9z3s9J4Y8bRtSGrLdM8qiWoDjg7Y/s1600/IMG_0965.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_SjboRFTxjBytJb5zrspyPGLVAewQDwV7HMAlgPHE1y4mG3vUzZ2zFyxWk1UWlPHEh6pywflUP8JZIiSgXRI0Fj5YOxO-CqaFZIggAcXEepCGbtkl9z3s9J4Y8bRtSGrLdM8qiWoDjg7Y/s400/IMG_0965.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A friend with a 4WD camper van managed to drag our caravan up onto the land. He'd just spent the morning in public dressed in a biohazard suit and clenched in a giant metal fist as a protest against Monanto, so his help was doubly-appreciated.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV7Vd_bt0JP2uqap5bqSRWWKxSpAzm88IDcC9l9a8460w5sXLZaLwotyC0LFB1nImlHRzNB45K7MqaCIE2U0NFtxA-uUDrNo34eKY29rAni3-jRtM8K9PkfBBVa4xbi5M6I4YdpZyx6SqK/s1600/IMG_0966.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhV7Vd_bt0JP2uqap5bqSRWWKxSpAzm88IDcC9l9a8460w5sXLZaLwotyC0LFB1nImlHRzNB45K7MqaCIE2U0NFtxA-uUDrNo34eKY29rAni3-jRtM8K9PkfBBVa4xbi5M6I4YdpZyx6SqK/s400/IMG_0966.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sofia demonstrates how the compost latrine works. It's a bit basic … but it's okay until I build a proper compost toilet.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguV-KPU_OgqbjBK1wLO5zAA-GM37UJz_GHGt6JA9IsY9nhSJJt3Hu0k81-OTGH0SNSS8tXL9E9PQzC8AeK9ey4Usw6u5b1lonsafPtSZb1ATjvjWMhx8jEUmyBHKhm4LpQWK8tDl8lPJx9/s1600/IMG_0980.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEguV-KPU_OgqbjBK1wLO5zAA-GM37UJz_GHGt6JA9IsY9nhSJJt3Hu0k81-OTGH0SNSS8tXL9E9PQzC8AeK9ey4Usw6u5b1lonsafPtSZb1ATjvjWMhx8jEUmyBHKhm4LpQWK8tDl8lPJx9/s400/IMG_0980.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Another friend had a couple of willows that needed a home. Here's one of them I planted. I have placed it close to where I am planning to dig out the large pond, as willows are water-lovers. Because they grow so quickly they will be a good resource for making things. I'm planning to plant a couple of dozen more.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj39tSwLGP3E53il6CGunITBtItQZXGXmR23zDq2CxAsjpszHqtR9BHPpdvvnekZvA9RXESWHGVGDnf0f41fYkaQEvtmmk2o3ACAevF-SNUiGIoW4ZkhyWsd7uDD27a8wMgG1GKf5NUI4Oa/s1600/IMG_0981.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj39tSwLGP3E53il6CGunITBtItQZXGXmR23zDq2CxAsjpszHqtR9BHPpdvvnekZvA9RXESWHGVGDnf0f41fYkaQEvtmmk2o3ACAevF-SNUiGIoW4ZkhyWsd7uDD27a8wMgG1GKf5NUI4Oa/s400/IMG_0981.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The thistles that are covering the pasture land are starting to flower beautifully. As I mentioned before, I'm letting them thrive for the first year - they are one way that the land is re-generating as minerals are brought up from the subsoil. The flowers provide food for bees and the thorns keep the rabbits away. Later, they will make green mulch when I mow them down in the autumn.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDx-qmUPovpmAEiAvAnCEzrQr_OCu-ilp-EOB24rvWh5CrI9BMTTL_cPYAn6HYovX2zJ4Kq6sXTKj_PNTGVkZvYHISiQhO8k1TR-hYzcspxK0FR8oOqh1UKCrqeFhRNW3kbo_cPZ_rKiU7/s1600/IMG_0982.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDx-qmUPovpmAEiAvAnCEzrQr_OCu-ilp-EOB24rvWh5CrI9BMTTL_cPYAn6HYovX2zJ4Kq6sXTKj_PNTGVkZvYHISiQhO8k1TR-hYzcspxK0FR8oOqh1UKCrqeFhRNW3kbo_cPZ_rKiU7/s400/IMG_0982.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I have cut an access path through them using a miniature hand-held scythe. I want to leave the roots intact - they make excellent channels for the roots of beneficial plant species as they rot down.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5upwDT5fZdOukoq0ULrDAFlr9-tn6rVGf3usfPdbz0iCTKKoKBoxiQiwCReNwY45IMdxB1_G0fPP2EcsJqauq49beqQ4pGVt-_rDiUlYJd5wOf9SkO0VfX_MEPazWDbw6PbLqEXcGML5q/s1600/IMG_0984.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5upwDT5fZdOukoq0ULrDAFlr9-tn6rVGf3usfPdbz0iCTKKoKBoxiQiwCReNwY45IMdxB1_G0fPP2EcsJqauq49beqQ4pGVt-_rDiUlYJd5wOf9SkO0VfX_MEPazWDbw6PbLqEXcGML5q/s400/IMG_0984.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I also cleared a fairly dense patch of brambles, revealing four young chestnut trees. Plenty of scratches to show for my efforts!<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEEjAOlolC9sbnpmLZGQFwfzOvdW90bxAfjoOv87ldIvLtyS43slnU8SNc0ijzVMdx7bOPLMZ0hRVhONLwFwkQJUKPhKnO-KUtob8StjWsoaS1MaOhAxcK4IqN8X3U4u3V0dT69Qf2xt1z/s1600/IMG_0986.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEEjAOlolC9sbnpmLZGQFwfzOvdW90bxAfjoOv87ldIvLtyS43slnU8SNc0ijzVMdx7bOPLMZ0hRVhONLwFwkQJUKPhKnO-KUtob8StjWsoaS1MaOhAxcK4IqN8X3U4u3V0dT69Qf2xt1z/s400/IMG_0986.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">One of the apple trees I planted. In total I have put in ten fruit trees this year and they are all doing well now the chill winds have died down.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL_cu2xTiXLRMzSzc7qlw44bYTC_ppalHRekz74L5bbJWheGom4eUcxu4bTzErgXJeFNib4C0mBK_pSfC7AvrP1m7qhY8r2UT-dNi7KAmTjvrJpL_zRr9biAxYn8T-tveS_bCfhKNbWeBs/s1600/IMG_0985.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiL_cu2xTiXLRMzSzc7qlw44bYTC_ppalHRekz74L5bbJWheGom4eUcxu4bTzErgXJeFNib4C0mBK_pSfC7AvrP1m7qhY8r2UT-dNi7KAmTjvrJpL_zRr9biAxYn8T-tveS_bCfhKNbWeBs/s400/IMG_0985.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The ground is now covered in buttercups. Beautiful, but also poisonous.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk_CUzTuwindOKUb4puhrkTef_O3eefLiMGSWR5XwJdqadFy6jVDL1SxYs6bpOG5Uzi92SLXrXyrVCxFLH7HHTyosb1570hQaC-NZpr3XY7hDMM8qO8UOoQBcVGr5pEmbxHPdc5uJIR1A4/s1600/IMG_0987.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgk_CUzTuwindOKUb4puhrkTef_O3eefLiMGSWR5XwJdqadFy6jVDL1SxYs6bpOG5Uzi92SLXrXyrVCxFLH7HHTyosb1570hQaC-NZpr3XY7hDMM8qO8UOoQBcVGr5pEmbxHPdc5uJIR1A4/s400/IMG_0987.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The enemy - creeping brambles coming up under the ground. I've been busy with the shears but may have to employ a pig or two in the long term.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJmXhWLvTLGfhzVZzWdQB1D3IgR8MtJaUjS_KTR2-TujIkpADnPjzL_f4VCEvZOo_LjJj19z-NrCs9SMkMbUzijVD_Duke4bwyqbf9NS4O3U5NSTBtbqVrWMiHq0-1NHSUNwuLCHUWu_m8/s1600/IMG_0993.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgJmXhWLvTLGfhzVZzWdQB1D3IgR8MtJaUjS_KTR2-TujIkpADnPjzL_f4VCEvZOo_LjJj19z-NrCs9SMkMbUzijVD_Duke4bwyqbf9NS4O3U5NSTBtbqVrWMiHq0-1NHSUNwuLCHUWu_m8/s400/IMG_0993.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The self-fertile almond tree. In the background you can see my rhubarb slug-protection teepee.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB8HJpYDzzu78yYctS-dhG6Jig9fYxMRDLspppY1JL6fyyded7RG7DYOQInDF3KWs6y3yI8cjyyEglHsUdyxvPAZcQ3b4f-2I8XDWsz5F1G4teq4qGofQS3XPZGyTNHQD6suavsXWsoEAd/s1600/IMG_0994.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgB8HJpYDzzu78yYctS-dhG6Jig9fYxMRDLspppY1JL6fyyded7RG7DYOQInDF3KWs6y3yI8cjyyEglHsUdyxvPAZcQ3b4f-2I8XDWsz5F1G4teq4qGofQS3XPZGyTNHQD6suavsXWsoEAd/s400/IMG_0994.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is the inconspicuous entrance to the five-acre wood, which slopes down steeply towards a river bed.</td></tr>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfJLLtyxgtVlhDEcCKIFTyUNc1RnIBwKhkHrLvPvIsI8bEXf0Q50CIlUl-x6855FRJSs8e2CUYwmUhaENPT2M3SS2HrZBzawS7kRTD0AumnebIKU96ioTjp8_urRf23vJURIwi5WuvIsYL/s1600/IMG_0996.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfJLLtyxgtVlhDEcCKIFTyUNc1RnIBwKhkHrLvPvIsI8bEXf0Q50CIlUl-x6855FRJSs8e2CUYwmUhaENPT2M3SS2HrZBzawS7kRTD0AumnebIKU96ioTjp8_urRf23vJURIwi5WuvIsYL/s400/IMG_0996.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Down in the wood, everything is in leaf. Some finches have taken residence in that box and there are chicks in there.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Y2nQ5pt1IMDwcilyFA5JHqctIsDEPyWpr9W23oOZVLqdIyZbTayBhO2dW1OAwWIDmffX2GhZucaKATLaK5gO2bwGFWoQ2Nc6ddMRWl50UZynX0a_hpfj7fY_9lJbmOlTmRhu8Wfd8eyk/s1600/IMG_0997.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh6Y2nQ5pt1IMDwcilyFA5JHqctIsDEPyWpr9W23oOZVLqdIyZbTayBhO2dW1OAwWIDmffX2GhZucaKATLaK5gO2bwGFWoQ2Nc6ddMRWl50UZynX0a_hpfj7fY_9lJbmOlTmRhu8Wfd8eyk/s400/IMG_0997.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The bracken is … prolific.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_Tv3p6M6tP5eyxdy0WerB_pKp38Bf0AUXou2X6z7oNvS1lw21mglUXu2L5NDY8VbgV1Ldd1GuVZJ4kCkGqZT9dR2zQs4nUOA_fVUHv8DNvJGtiaYWuU7iG1gN322HnwNEuwqbxg_yK8Y1/s1600/IMG_0999.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi_Tv3p6M6tP5eyxdy0WerB_pKp38Bf0AUXou2X6z7oNvS1lw21mglUXu2L5NDY8VbgV1Ldd1GuVZJ4kCkGqZT9dR2zQs4nUOA_fVUHv8DNvJGtiaYWuU7iG1gN322HnwNEuwqbxg_yK8Y1/s400/IMG_0999.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">This is an ash tree. Nobody knows how long it will take before ash dieback disease spreads to Cornwall, but for now the tree is in rude health.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8-6UobK5yxpcrqpElyst0s8nOEVsSb1FK5RgKPgPt4akniutFEZ2lbgz8h8ThDNguykKrlDh6MxaCndhkE3iCdvFIfuEbv5__gwaZ5-k9zLt8ogpLlQMO-OOUFMHGe-NkgcS-kiOCtIBV/s1600/IMG_0992.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh8-6UobK5yxpcrqpElyst0s8nOEVsSb1FK5RgKPgPt4akniutFEZ2lbgz8h8ThDNguykKrlDh6MxaCndhkE3iCdvFIfuEbv5__gwaZ5-k9zLt8ogpLlQMO-OOUFMHGe-NkgcS-kiOCtIBV/s400/IMG_0992.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Back out of the woods again, this pea is literally the first food I am likely to eat from this land. </td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWL_NDK-khX5XGTx-i6CYITY0pu1Ak78QdiPjuNOZTtbGSXI_BdtYBWuDBAjg9032F1LT73fJCqrLqiGlGVLSxSh8KaT41bxX70ctGHI23NzdDZgl6dDonaLD0jMJIgf2aQcgrUm9U8pBq/s1600/IMG_1005.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjWL_NDK-khX5XGTx-i6CYITY0pu1Ak78QdiPjuNOZTtbGSXI_BdtYBWuDBAjg9032F1LT73fJCqrLqiGlGVLSxSh8KaT41bxX70ctGHI23NzdDZgl6dDonaLD0jMJIgf2aQcgrUm9U8pBq/s400/IMG_1005.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The track leading onto the land needed a bit of upgrading. Rather than buying in gravel, I'm putting down barrows full of rocky solid from the potato farmer's field.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI4f-QuJa1d55XaUSEPsClwgosM_5liHnVeE7P_GHJMA4bfq-iWZ4GZVN4569-osHkGDaiEScjLtvoo-gkBsRIyQoYBCTpGQWIPWY3MR12VULCJ9YWoi2gCt2Rwqg6VtENjFQk4Bh9noqM/s1600/IMG_1006.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiI4f-QuJa1d55XaUSEPsClwgosM_5liHnVeE7P_GHJMA4bfq-iWZ4GZVN4569-osHkGDaiEScjLtvoo-gkBsRIyQoYBCTpGQWIPWY3MR12VULCJ9YWoi2gCt2Rwqg6VtENjFQk4Bh9noqM/s400/IMG_1006.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The track is rich in wildflowers.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLmvPtnI2JBaAuSUu3aFX6cMRBawxiVyLe23HBMRm4UoCj9a6TvUhpkEe_1n0wdCX5WebClzC_yEcvg21HJMVQwfEu_NSMSogf1PpTCMhaPWbMLwLxkYjMtOOUShMmYMVM-9YZgbYXpKLx/s1600/IMG_1007.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiLmvPtnI2JBaAuSUu3aFX6cMRBawxiVyLe23HBMRm4UoCj9a6TvUhpkEe_1n0wdCX5WebClzC_yEcvg21HJMVQwfEu_NSMSogf1PpTCMhaPWbMLwLxkYjMtOOUShMmYMVM-9YZgbYXpKLx/s400/IMG_1007.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">A bit more domestic - I found this antique pewter tea pot in a junk shop in Copenhagen. The bottom is corroded and full of holes, making it an excellent place to grow a gaud.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Gsh5R2dhe53yBrmDs3KrvvL2g4B-PB3TgNcGSg6O4JplvRClpww3NRyNra6DeNjCa00C1VE1JUpHdyRVeAdK9UZuik1SZbUlDXo9Vd-hk_sMOGwz-T_kl7tZZFl2vBVkRbTRj48zlVM1/s1600/IMG_1008.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi4Gsh5R2dhe53yBrmDs3KrvvL2g4B-PB3TgNcGSg6O4JplvRClpww3NRyNra6DeNjCa00C1VE1JUpHdyRVeAdK9UZuik1SZbUlDXo9Vd-hk_sMOGwz-T_kl7tZZFl2vBVkRbTRj48zlVM1/s400/IMG_1008.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">All food waste from home goes into the wormery. When the trays are half-way decomposed I dig a hole next to a tree and put it in, worms and all. I'm improving the humous gradually, and the tree roots have something to feed on as it decomposes. The worms have babies in the other trays and the population remains about the same.<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqKLp6jsUZ6qIe0URLwqYwUls6kKM1JuAg9-yDIHuDDSnvAb3nI4b5MD-thvI_veze4rcClZgxjQmpSC6rvtMb-gMveLuR0KrL6sanpV4r_kMnqkIQzxCha4n_c6nTuC16D-a7qXMVbZaJ/s1600/IMG_0979.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjqKLp6jsUZ6qIe0URLwqYwUls6kKM1JuAg9-yDIHuDDSnvAb3nI4b5MD-thvI_veze4rcClZgxjQmpSC6rvtMb-gMveLuR0KrL6sanpV4r_kMnqkIQzxCha4n_c6nTuC16D-a7qXMVbZaJ/s400/IMG_0979.JPG" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Zone 1.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijbV6QhCcZpfEcppMOyZmQdAfzVmpVdaXo1QvPJ_B8kj8YpbE0JLddgGfYknfygpPE3UcfzcbgJ99HvGXp-mg6I1WO9fYVfG8-Ybf5wp_FPx-W3zSh-GdqeU_uE3zHwMF9hjaxG-zWk5LX/s1600/IMG_1009.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEijbV6QhCcZpfEcppMOyZmQdAfzVmpVdaXo1QvPJ_B8kj8YpbE0JLddgGfYknfygpPE3UcfzcbgJ99HvGXp-mg6I1WO9fYVfG8-Ybf5wp_FPx-W3zSh-GdqeU_uE3zHwMF9hjaxG-zWk5LX/s400/IMG_1009.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I have not really started on the large-scale mulching yet but this is a start. This peace tree has home-made compost underneath the cardboard. Grass impairs the growth of young trees - eventually there will be no grass at all - just shrubs, trees and mulch.</td></tr>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDjIbl725Gwtx5OByw5b3_SDxzRjhCwJl0WH8EPmIiMY-GO8aVk1yU7YkdC09950ewULfNqDSEyiYfT7GdVqqhjZxO-9ocD7he1vpFv5DAV7JpphSfoY2jjA_KRe4Q-evXleS5NuBMNG26/s1600/IMG_1013.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDjIbl725Gwtx5OByw5b3_SDxzRjhCwJl0WH8EPmIiMY-GO8aVk1yU7YkdC09950ewULfNqDSEyiYfT7GdVqqhjZxO-9ocD7he1vpFv5DAV7JpphSfoY2jjA_KRe4Q-evXleS5NuBMNG26/s400/IMG_1013.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sunburned me.</td></tr>
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I've come to the conclusion that I need to hire some earth moving equipment to dig out the pond, level the terrace for the poly tunnel and make the ground around the caravan level enough for an awning. Did I mention the hugel beds?<br />
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My new chainsaw arrives in the post tomorrow. Good job as the fridge is full of mushroom spores that need fresh hardwood logs to impregnate … I never thought I'd be into fungiculture, but here I am - life is strange.<br />
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-82358686164128459922013-05-15T13:23:00.003-07:002013-05-15T13:23:55.296-07:00Bursting with Life<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3L_azQ7_OIS7Zz4ouyEFRCJQ92NK5ZNBY24eD6yrOSAhzpetENd2kyvHxTzc7JWkVkMzJnNEU0XzUniMxQybLBAyJmfMPgz4eptCPuGmvT81BIZj__-rwejuPxNeKB0USSXejTPFro6Sv/s1600/DSC_1905.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3L_azQ7_OIS7Zz4ouyEFRCJQ92NK5ZNBY24eD6yrOSAhzpetENd2kyvHxTzc7JWkVkMzJnNEU0XzUniMxQybLBAyJmfMPgz4eptCPuGmvT81BIZj__-rwejuPxNeKB0USSXejTPFro6Sv/s400/DSC_1905.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Down working at the wood today. Spring is begrudgingly arriving after the longest winter in memory. Wildflowers and bluebells are out, and the soil is still wet and sodden from the spectacular storm we had yesterday that blew in from the Atlantic and caused mayhem on the land.<br />
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Walking around in the wood I'm overwhelmed by the amount of work that needs to be done if I am to turn this into a working venture. Still, I won't be short of things to do.<br />
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But, with the sap rising, now is no time to be thinking of cutting wood and coppicing the hazels. The woodland is filled with the sound of birds, and everywhere I looked green shoots were bursting forth.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTX_oZ_mHScrqIKpJuP9EIz6u9dK4JRH3ZCzasOVNpzZ8fFd2a1JWZbe-9BwfxdEbCmnwuOXF2OaLf-zx4WuSqfcGORuOQGDw0zYy1kq67Cr6BGpEhw0DpnqfWG3ihUhw2gwrE4YgGIcIz/s1600/DSC_1892.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTX_oZ_mHScrqIKpJuP9EIz6u9dK4JRH3ZCzasOVNpzZ8fFd2a1JWZbe-9BwfxdEbCmnwuOXF2OaLf-zx4WuSqfcGORuOQGDw0zYy1kq67Cr6BGpEhw0DpnqfWG3ihUhw2gwrE4YgGIcIz/s400/DSC_1892.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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I like bracken quite a lot, but it's no good for the land. I'm considering getting some pigs and an electric fence … although I'd have to be there every day to look after them, and I'm not (at the moment).<br />
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Wildflowers have been popping up everywhere. It is a veritable flower garden. Here are just a few types that I took pictures of.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZgbTpXFpZcHD6A68fdsxhJ-rGslzfYo9ZaKbQtC8nUaQ77Tmv2HPT8rAnoCxwS3_X2SyUicTSyT3HKBecQNvoQAn7tBkzYOIuXdMb1OTikPVCfKjvIet3q4NiB_BgCw0L8n5a0sS6oB9t/s1600/DSC_1888.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZgbTpXFpZcHD6A68fdsxhJ-rGslzfYo9ZaKbQtC8nUaQ77Tmv2HPT8rAnoCxwS3_X2SyUicTSyT3HKBecQNvoQAn7tBkzYOIuXdMb1OTikPVCfKjvIet3q4NiB_BgCw0L8n5a0sS6oB9t/s400/DSC_1888.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3mpUoko2QQshB-KoLdHuKHRs0FYY77r_KOltiRRqoFWKfXtb4OvmXm_x2C0VQCnuwWgrbKvbNqOVBfjltOvqLthzrltEToILyl0j5RySTSM4TeTQ9BHIFthjoEpz4ctBe21kT9INYdTGO/s1600/DSC_1896.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh3mpUoko2QQshB-KoLdHuKHRs0FYY77r_KOltiRRqoFWKfXtb4OvmXm_x2C0VQCnuwWgrbKvbNqOVBfjltOvqLthzrltEToILyl0j5RySTSM4TeTQ9BHIFthjoEpz4ctBe21kT9INYdTGO/s400/DSC_1896.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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And of course, the carpet of bluebells …<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis0ipdn9jLGCCrfvCR0a5KuVks5Tb4NoWWoN5Tx5UU-FIp3dVIESRF_bK8ByF0flacLW6zgVKKWF3RROP9nwm_nV6tZKp_YvtfXbVzx0_VNxyJ3nXAzgDgpvXj2Gu8j9i4ViZPAwbaX5Is/s1600/DSC_1886.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis0ipdn9jLGCCrfvCR0a5KuVks5Tb4NoWWoN5Tx5UU-FIp3dVIESRF_bK8ByF0flacLW6zgVKKWF3RROP9nwm_nV6tZKp_YvtfXbVzx0_VNxyJ3nXAzgDgpvXj2Gu8j9i4ViZPAwbaX5Is/s400/DSC_1886.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Not quite as pretty as bluebells are the milk thistles that are springing up everywhere on the former pasture land. Like most people, my first thought was 'how do I destroy them?' But then I did a bit of research and found out that what I'm seeing here is the land healing itself.<br />
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This pasture will have had cows tramping around it for many years, compacting the soils and chewing the grass to within an inch of its life. Now, with the cows gone, deep-rooted thistles are breaking up the sub-soils for me and bringing vital nutrients to the surface. What's more, bees love thistles - and slugs hate them - so I'll let most of them remain this year.<br />
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I have dug a couple of experimental veg garden zones just to find out what the soil is like for growing stuff in. There's nothing special in them, just some peas, pumpkins, artichoke, sweetcorn and garlic - oh, and some strawberries for good measure. Of course, with all the rabbits around I've had to fence them off with chicken wire.<br />
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Things I've learned or figured out in the past week:<br />
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- The stiff prevailing winds mean I am going to have to plant a row of trees to make a windbreak. Without this my fruit trees will never flourish and the soil temperatures will be impaired. I'm probably going to go with Italian alder, which is recommended as a fast growing deciduous tree that also fixes nitrogen.<br />
- Birds have moved into the two bird boxes I put up in the wood. I think they are finches of some type. My neighbour, the friendly old man, has huge boxes in his trees that he says owls live in.<br />
- Speaking of whom, he told me that my wood was planted around thirty years ago by the wealthy local estate owner as a pheasant shooting wood. Alas, he was caught having an affair with his secretary, and in the divorce proceedings he had to sell off much of his land, including Fox Wood. He also almost killed himself in a tractor accident on the field that was there before the wood was created, but that's another story.<br />
- Slugs have attacked my rhubarb which I planted. To deter them I have placed a 'ring of spikes' i.e. thistles, around it.<br />
- I have started to dig a pond with my new azada (more on that soon). It's going to be quite large and will contain several different zones. It is hard work digging by hand, but better than going to a gym.<br />
- I have found several large chunks of granite - gate posts - lying around the land.<br />
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-53523901898618133712013-05-04T13:16:00.000-07:002013-06-19T08:20:25.144-07:00Island Life<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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This update on Fox Wood is long overdue - apologies! What has happened since my last update? A few things … and not a lot.<br />
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The thing that didn't happen for a long time was spring. Yes, shortly after I wrote the last update everything started to freeze up. The bluebells half-emerged and then stopped in their tracks. Winter weather returned and didn't let up for weeks on end. It even snowed! That didn't stop me doing some work on the field. I spent a couple of days planting trees with my daughters - fair wind or foul - although mostly foul.<br />
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We now have a number of fruit trees growing there, protected from the rabbits by plastic tubes. I also stuck in a couple of silver birches which I saw, sorry and sad, outside a supermarket in plastic bags. Not the best start to life but hopefully they will thrive and I love looking at silver birches in clear Autumnal sun.<br />
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I have also re-evaluated some of the things I plan to do with the land. This, in large part, is due to having been deeply engrossed and captivated by Joel Salatin's book, <i>The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer</i>, which a friend lent me.<br />
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Revelation!<br />
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Salatin, a self-professed, crank and lunatic, is one of the sanest people on planet earth! His mission is to heal the earth - well at least the bit on his farm, by a process of bio-remidaition. Eschewing most chemical and petroleum inputs, he has more or less restored the carbon cycle on his Virginia farm and is experiencing sheer ectasy in the process. I want to do the same!<br />
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But I have found out that Fox Wood is an island surrounded by plastic. Yes, almost overnight, all the surrounding fields, once the first crop of flowers had been harvested and sold, suddenly were covered in plastic. I took this picture - on the left is the Fox Wood future food forest field and on the right is the nameless agribusiness field suddenly covered with plastic. I believe potatoes have been planted underneath.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">The fields of Cornwall have been shrink-wrapped. It's the new agribusiness craze to get at least two crops a year out of the poor exhausted soils</td></tr>
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This stuff has appeared all over the countryside. It's reminiscent of the awful plasticultura landscapes of southern Spain. Fox Wood is quite isolated in the middle of all this agricultural abuse.<br />
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On a more positive note, I attended a talk in Penzance given by a fellow from Friends of the Earth and <a href="http://beestrawbridge.blogspot.co.uk/" target="_blank">Brigit Strawbridge</a> about bees. I won't go into details about the terrible plight bees are in, probably due in part to neonicotinoid chemicals, but it did spur me to at least do something positive. I went around the land digging out small islands of soil from the field and sowing wildflower seeds. When they grow it should be at least a bit of relief for the beleaguered bees in the area who have to deal with all the fields suddenly being turned to plastic. In the future I'm planning to turn some of the field over to being a wildflower meadow because a) It'll be beautiful and b) It will attract pollinating insects to my fruit trees. I also put a few bird boxes up to try and encourage avian friends - birds are welcome at Fox Wood!<br />
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As for Joel Salatin and his book, which I mentioned above, he's convinced me to not drill a well, which I had been planning to do. Instead, I'm going to dig a series of PONDS! Yes, ponds, with water harvested from the ample downpours that hit this area for much of the year, flowing down through my terraced hand-dug fields like a Spanish acequia. The soil I have excavated so far is rich and deep and full of earthworms. I'm not worried about its fertility.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Only after I'd dug a few of these bee rehab wildflower mini-meadow zones did I realise that they could be mistaken for shallow graves ...</td></tr>
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BTW my large poly tunnel has arrived - 30ft long and 10ft wide - and I have plenty of plans for what is going to happen inside it. As have various hand-crafted tools, such as a Swedish axe, a hardened steel billhook - and the Spanish azada will be arriving soon (why use a spade when you can use one of these?). I'm thinking chickens and moveable electric fences, egg mobiles and aquaculture. I might need to borrow a couple of pigs to clear the underbrush in the woodland. My worm compost pile is back in full production now after the Danish vermicide episode and even my daughters' guinea pigs are providing some fine carbon-based enrichment for the land. Things are getting going - although the Fox Wood money fund is dwindling fast, so it'll be free and easy things from here on it.<br />
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Honestly, sometimes at the moment, I have so many ideas I can hardly sleep at night.<br />
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There's probably some other things too, but I'm going to work there tomorrow so will take some more pictures and provide another update sooner rather than later.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I found this badger hole in the woodland - nice use of a tree root as a lintel over the front door</td></tr>
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-51724705308721938292013-03-11T13:09:00.001-07:002013-03-11T13:42:54.255-07:00Signs of Life<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Signs of life - moss <a href="http://hiddenforest.co.nz/bryophytes/mosses/reproduction.htm" target="_blank">sending up tentacles</a> from the leaf litter in Fox Wood</td></tr>
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A few days ago I returned to Fox Wood. It was a long journey to get there and I had to pass through six different countries - seven if you count Cornwall as its own land, and plenty do. </h3>
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On the way I almost froze - indeed the car and the trailer, which was carrying half of our worldly possessions, got caught in a blizzard in Germany and I had to spend the night shivering in the back. Luckily I had brought a nice warm duvet , some blankets, and a few drams of Irish whiskey. It wasn't so bad.</h3>
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When I finally got to Cornwall it was warmer - spring was on the way. Some trees had burst into blossom and many fields, including those surrounding Fox Wood, were yellow with early season daffodils.</h3>
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Fox Wood itself was wet and misty. When I got there I felt like I was intruding and a group or rabbits bounded away at our approach (I was with my friend Kate), showing their white tails as they scattered.</h3>
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I investigated the forest further. On my last visit I hadn't been to all corners of the land, but this time I did, finding a few gnarled, ent-like oaks. They seemed to me like guardians of the wood. I look forward to getting to know them a bit better.</h3>
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Signs of new life were everywhere. Most of the trees were coming into bud, whereas others had been green all winter.</h3>
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I walked around the land, chatting with Kate, who seemed to be able to identify far more of the plants than me! Bluebells were pushing their way up through the earth beneath our feet, although I didn't take any pictures yet - that will have to wait for when spring really arrives. I have a feeling it is going to be pretty spectacular given the number that were poking their green leaves up through the forest floor.</h3>
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I discovered a rusting old barbed-wire fence running through the wood. What was the purpose of that?</h3>
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Everywhere was damp and spongy and dripping with promise. A woodpecker suddenly fluttered away from of us, its brown wings beating, although it was too quick for my camera.</h3>
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I looked at the field where I am to plant the food forest and build some kind of dwelling. It looked pretty big - bigger than the last time I looked at it. Perhaps it had grown during my absence?</h3>
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There is an interesting way in and out of the field, a very common feature in Britain's stony places - the rock stile.</h3>
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All too soon it was time to leave. I had planned to camp out in Fox Wood, but fate had other plans - a rotten cold had got to me and I didn't want to make it any worse by sleeping in this damp, soggy, misty place. Not this time.</h3>
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Instead I retreated to Penzance and popped into the Turk's Head, a 700-year-old pub, for a pint of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharp%27s_Brewery" target="_blank">Doom Bar</a> ale and a Cornish pasty. It wasn't bad at all.</h3>
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1658129315126034386.post-59763473502305548632013-02-09T05:57:00.001-08:002014-01-20T02:10:22.012-08:00A New Beginning<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Welcome to my new blog, <i>Tales From Fox Wood</i>!</h3>
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Fox Wood is a peaceful seven acre wood in the heart of deepest Cornwall. It's pretty hidden away, like a secret world, and it's hard to find even if you know where to look.</h3>
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On this blog there will be lots of pictures, a few thoughts, but not too many words. I'm letting the pictures speak for themselves. I want lots of people to read my blog and hopefully be inspired - everyone's welcome.</h3>
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So, welcome to my wood. It's in Cornwall, as I mentioned. Cornwall, in most people's minds, is famous for one thing: pirates!</h3>
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But the truth is you won't find many pirates there these days. There are lots of surfers, and lots of down-to-earth people who are making their own quiet way in the face of economic meltdown.</h3>
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In short - it's my kind of place! That's why we bought a wood there. Next month we will be moving to Cornwall from Denmark, where we live now. That's me, my wife Michelle, and our two daughters Jasmine and Sofia. They are very excited.</h3>
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We won't be living in the wood - at least, not yet. My plan is to turn it into a working wood, with coppicing, charcoal making, wood turning and all the rest of it. </h3>
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First of all we'll be living in the town of Penzance, where the children will be going to school. Penzance is a medium-sized market town. We all feel right at home there and it has lots of shops like this one.</h3>
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Fox Wood is a little distance away, not too far from this beach. I should be able to get there by bicycle, if need be. I could even walk.</h3>
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It's not awfully far from the fishing village of Porthleven, so we should be able to get fresh fish when the boats come in.</h3>
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And not far away is Land's End - the very tip of southern Britain. Would you believe me when I said there was a cat who sat at the very tip of Land's End and looked out across the sea towards America? I'm not joking!</h3>
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Cornwall is surrounded by the ocean, which can sometimes be wild and dangerous. It's a place of old magic.</h3>
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It's also a great place to just sit on a rock and look out to sea.</h3>
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In the middle of Fox Wood there's a large field and I'm planning to turn this into a permaculture food forest - or forest garden. I want to work with nature, not against it. This is what a food forest looks like on paper.</h3>
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So, as you can see, I have a lot of work to do. </h3>
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It's been a long time in the planning. I have had time to read a lot of books about what we are planning to do. This is just one bit of my bookshelf (the most interesting bit).</h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4U8w_PEL42ChGg5Cgni0tOSvA3MT0TwxrNptzGEMUZ9rj1kU2Gjk3YMzbLDjq7BZhRqjRAQs2iL6ojw5HVNhfTiH2sU9MOMgMnMLB-u_dH_SUd-hweoEdOQq-l7P_QaFmGO-dcXODrkQ_/s1600/photo(2).JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4U8w_PEL42ChGg5Cgni0tOSvA3MT0TwxrNptzGEMUZ9rj1kU2Gjk3YMzbLDjq7BZhRqjRAQs2iL6ojw5HVNhfTiH2sU9MOMgMnMLB-u_dH_SUd-hweoEdOQq-l7P_QaFmGO-dcXODrkQ_/s400/photo(2).JPG" height="298" width="400" /></a></h3>
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People think you have to be rich to do what we're doing, but you don't. The woodland itself cost about the same as a new family car. </h3>
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I like to get things that other people don't want or have thrown out. Today, for example, I found a nice double-glazed window in a dump. A lot of energy was used to make that window - energy that one day we won't have so readily available. One day it might be part of a house. Or greenhouse. </h3>
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I also picked up five wrought iron windows from some stable blocks that had been demolished. If nobody wants them, I'll have them. They are old - they don't make them like this any more.</h3>
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So, as you can see, even though I am not even in the same country as my woodland yet, I am preparing for it. I am even growing trees in my flat.</h3>
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Those are hawthorn cuttings, a horse chestnut tree and a small apple tree, all growing merrily in plastic bottles I found chucked in a hedge. One day, I hope, they'll be forming part of the rich tapestry of my woodland.</h3>
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Thinking about the long road of energy descent we have ahead of us as global oil peaks and then declines isn't half as scary when you are doing something about making that ride less bumpy. I saw this installation in a window in Mousehole, says it all really ...<br />
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Jason Heppenstallhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17886109260870545074noreply@blogger.com23