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.
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 ...
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.
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.
This is the site of the future poly tunnel. I'm levelling the ground so that it is not so steep.
A silver birch coming to life again.
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.
A willow in bud.
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.
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.
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 ...
... until I removed the spire guard and noticed this. It's really hard to kill a young tree!
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).
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 'The One Straw Revolution' !
Here's an insect hotel I made. Several bees have moved in already - so they must like it.
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.
Some purple flowers that just popped up in the grass.
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.
A sycamore sapling unfolding its leaves.
Sycamore leaf emerging.
The kids' vegetable plots.
Down in the coppice wood.
Patches of bluebells are appearing.
A close-up of the woodland floor.
And another one.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ferns unfurling.
Not sure what this is ...
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.
This is what happens when you let low side branches grow. Is it me, or does it look a bit like a rhino?
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.
Within the wood is this row of hazels. I'll probably coppice them next year as the new shoots they produce are extremely useful.
Oak being strangled by ivy.
I've cut many of the ivy stems, so hopefully the old oak trees will be saved.
I love the way hazel looks like rippling muscles.
Some of the wood I cut, stacked up in different sized piles.
I'm experimenting with growing vegetables in the newly-coppiced forest area. These are potatoes coming up.
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.
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.
Some of these are HEAVY. Still, being on a slope, I just rolled 'em down it.
A lone chestnut standard amidst its fallen comrades. I wonder, does it feel survivor guilt?
I have more wood than I know what to do with. Luckily, a couple of buyers have already stepped forward for some of it.
Another pile.
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.
One of the bird boxes that my daughters made.
Orange blossom. Yes, that's right.
Baby oranges. I also have lemons, olives and avocados - although they'll need to go in the poly tunnel next winter.
The new steps. I've sprinkled wildflower seed on the (probably) sterile soil, so soon this should be a riot of colour.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
Penzance promenade during a recent storm
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?
A flooded Somerset, seen from above
I was in nearby Devon yesterday and the local newspaper had the above picture on the front page with the headline Welcome to the Future. This is the place where the government wants to build a new nuclear power station.
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.
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.
The hobbit house at Plan It Earth - see here for more info
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
I recently watched all of the episodes of the BBC series 'Victorian Farm' and went on to watch 'Wartime Farm' - 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.
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.
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.
I'm just thinking ahead and it pays to spot potential predators lurking in bushes.
