End the Winter Season with some Mowing in the Orchard

The Winter Season is when we do most of the conservation work on the Lynchmere Commons. The volunteer gang has worked hard this season and despite the near continual rain and snow we’ve been very busy. Now the nesting season is suddenly in full swing (as it’s not snowing this week) we can stand back and admire all of the cutting, felling, burning, thinning, scraping, digging,filming, laying, fencing and mending we’ve been doing but before we do there is just time to fit in a little mowing.

We planted a community orchard a couple of years ago in a sheltered corner of one of the Ridgecap fields that adjoin the commons. These fields are traditional hay meadows and pastures, once the mainstay of every small farm but now very rare and endangered. This is mainly because without being ploughed up and reseeded with modern varieties of grass, and with no fertilisers and pesticides being applied the yield (in terms of grass) is far too low to pay for the monster machinery that now populates our farms and countryside. Likewise we’ve planted up the orchard with traditional apple varieties from Sussex and surrounding counties, all on large and traditional half-standard sized rootstocks  rather than the higher yielding and smaller bush varieties.

The orchard is not grazed so we need to cut the grass by hand. Having been a rough corner of the meadow it’s a serious challenge and the first aim is to reduce the tussocks and remove the old thatch of dead plants ready for the new season.

With a little sunshine a tiny bit of coaching in technique with a scythe and a lot of enthusiasm it didn’t take long to get through the orchard – keeping the rakers busy. Andy is using one of my oversized hay rakes – it has a 32inch head,nearly 3 foot, and a 6ft handle which makes it harder to use but once you get used to it you cover a lot of ground. Both Andy and the rake seem to have survived the experience.

With a good turnout (a promise of free food and drink is always a good thing) we had upto 9 scythes out mowing, enough for a team, with several Austrian Scythes a couple of English Scythes and Nick joined us with his original ‘Turk Scythe’. These were first imported from Europe around the 1970′s when manufacture of English scythes stopped. Very light in comparison to the English Scythe. This one has a classic Austrian style blade that we often use today but the handle or snathe is very interesting with it’s straight shaft and fixed handgrips. Very light but only suited to one size of user.

I’m not sure that the scything and raking was the main attraction here, I rather think it was mainly just to work up an appetite for lunch! It was the last task of our winter work programme and so a bit of an end of term party as well as the nature of the work now changes through the summer season.

A good job done. A little bit of exercise, good company and a lunch in the orchard, a nice way to get some fresh air. Of course the job could have been done with a strimmer – but it’s really not so much fun to stand and watch a strimmer, you can’t rake the grass off afterwards and with 9 mowers on the task  it was a really quick (if not completely proficient) job.

I find it thought provoking to reflect upon which is really the most efficient way of working, one mower with a petrol strimmer for a dayor two, and Allen Scythe for a few hours or several mowers with scythes and a few rakers and forkers for a couple of hours? This blog isn’t really the best place for discussing this so I’m in the process of opening up a new site ‘The Scythe Grinders Arms‘ to host a wider discussion of environmental issues and my pet rants.

If you live in the Haslemere area and like the idea of working on the Lynchmere Commons and the meadows now and then why not join in with the Volunteer working tasks – you can get more information via the Lynchmerecommons blogsite.

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Firewood Thoughts

I’ve been thinking about firewood quite a lot recently – and not just as an excuse to post my favourite view of the commons with my favourite landrover, well one of my favourite landrovers, in the photo. We’re still waiting and hoping for Winter to be overwhelmed by Spring, but despite the longer evenings and the sun higher in the sky it snowed again last week. It’s been the coldest March for at least 50years around here.

With it being so cold we’re still burning a lot of wood and dry firewood is at a premium right now. I’ve ended up burning some of the wood I’d put aside to make my my first charcoal of the season -  it’s never easy to predict just how much firewood you will need each year.

To eke out my supplies I’ll take advantage of any dry seasoned wood I come across. The load of well seasoned Sweet Chestnut in the back of the Landrover had to be removed while I was mending the stock fencing and it seemed a shame to waste it.

As I’m burning the last of my stored and seasoned dry firewood it’s a very good time to be starting to prepare next years and I’m also trying to get ahead with preparing some wood for my charcoal making through the summer.

Just about any wood will burn once it’s dried out or seasoned though some woods will burn more easily due to their density and smell more attractive as they burn. This is a collection of Beech, Rowan, Birch and Sweet Chestnut being split ready for the sun to season it – provided of course that we do get any sun this year. These are all good firewoods but they are not dry enough to burn efficiently yet and need the summer and strong sunlight to reduce the moisture content.

Just to hammer this home – if you try to burn 10Kg of only partially seasoned wood at 30% moisture – then you will have to boil off 3Kg of water. Boiling off the water reduces the temperature and efficiency of your fire as well as condensing with other volatile chemicals in your chimney to form creosote.

Much better to let the summer sun dry your firewood to 20% moisture content or below if possible – but it’s hard to go much drier because of the ambient moisture content in the air. Even if you do dry the wood completely, unless it’s stored in an atmosphere with zero humidity it will start to soak up moisture again quickly.

When the wood is dry enough it will burn much more efficiently and deliver more heat – the volatile chemicals are also more likely to be burnt increasing the efficiency of the burn and reducing the deposits in the chimney.

Once your wood is drying nicely it needs to be stacked to protect it from the rain – but still allow the sunlight to continue drying it and the wind to blow through it.

In our climate some kind of roof on the stack is necessary as well as a base to lift the stack off the ground and prevent moisture from wicking up into the wood from the ground. This stack is self supporting in the Bavarian style with a double wall of split logs curved around at the corners. The pallets on top allow an air space for the wood to continue drying and stay dry until it’s needed.

With so many other jobs to attend to it’s hard to give the firewood the attention it deserves. But we’ve struggled to heat our cottage this winter and that’s a good reminder that I need to give my firewood every chance to dry if I want to stay as warm as possible through next winter.

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Making Hay by Hand While the Sun Shines

This little corner of grass at the Weald & Downland Open Air Museum is not going to win any ‘perfect meadow’ awards – at least not yet. This is only the second year that we’ve cut the grass by hand for hay in this corner and with the weather this year the wind and rain has pushed it over until it’s lodged in a big tangle. Definitely something of a challenge especially when you are doing it as a demonstration.

The intention is to cut this area for hay late in the summer so that we encourage traditional meadow wildflowers to gradually develop. By cutting and removing the grass the soil fertility should fall allowing the wildflowers to compete better with the grasses and by cutting later, after the annual flowers have seeded we should encourage the flowers to germinate and spread. How long this will take depends upon the state of the soil and the species already present – it could take many years.

But back to the present and the  window of good weather is only scheduled to last a couple of days so there is no time to waste, tangled or not, I have to get the grass cut and laid out in the sun to dry.

Along the way I managed to avoid field mice and a grass snake and even managed to mow around what I think is the wildflower ‘self heal’ though I am far from an expert and happy to be corrected. If so, it’s a good find, typical of a traditional pasture and encouragement to keep up the management.

By late afternoon I’ve cut around 1/6 of an acre. Not a lot, but with the temperature close to 30C, tangled rough grass and plenty of interested visitors to chat with it feels like a lot more!

There is an old tradition of Scythesman’s wages – which includes unlimited cider, it’s a tradition of which I thoroughly approve – and I plan to make sure its a tradition that doesn’t die out if I can help it. We’ve yet to discover whether the museum’s barrel will give out before I do, but having been born and brought up in Somerset I do have a head start.  And before you mention it, yes I do realise that the plastic bottles are not traditional – but they are recycled, several times,  and I’m not against all progress.

The eagled eyes scythe spotters amongst you will notice that the scythe in the picture is an old English scythe, it’s a Nash Crown blade and a snathe which is not as adjustable as I’d like but I’ve been using a lot this year and grown to like it, though I cut most of this grass with an Austrian scythe as lodged grass and heat favoured it.

Thanks to the brief spell of hot weather the grass dried quickly and after turning all Saturday and Sunday the hay is dry and ready just in time before the weather breaks.

Dealing with loose hay can be a problem – both to move and to store – as everyone is used to working with bales. It’s really not worth using a mechanised baler for such small areas – but it’s a problem to move it without baling it. So for next year I plan on making a wooden hand baler.  But for this year with no time to bring it in I am left with only one option – to cock it up – that is to build it into 5 large haycocks which should allow the water to run off for a few days until the weather improves, the haycocks dry off and it can be moved inside.

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Firewood Thoughts

I get to thinking about firewood quite a lot at this time of year.  Our main heat source in the winter is wood and knowing how to get the most efficient burn makes quite a difference to the temperature in the cottage, and to the amout of wood I need to shift on a daily basis.

There is a lot of folklore around firewood. Not without reason either as in the days before central heating (whats that?), double glazing (must do something about that soon) and cavity wall insulation, having poor firewood could mean freezing to death or even burning your house down rather than sitting next to the fire in a cosy warm room.

The good news is that all wood burns. Even better, all wood delivers about the same heat energy per Kg. It’s just that some woods are less dense so  a 1 tonne pile of  birch will take up twice the volume of 1 tonne of oak, for example. If  you notice that you burn your way through more birch, willow or softwoods than oak then that’s the simple explanation, you need to burn roughly twice as many logs. Most other woods are somewhere in between in terms of density. Since most firewood is delivered in volume – it’s something to be aware of.

Of course it’s not quite that simple as any wood you care to burn will also contain moisture. Even the floors and doors in the house will contain some moisture which is dependent upon the atmospheric moisture content – the wood will adjust which is why things tend to shift through the year from summer to winter as it swells and contracts. When it’s cut wood has a moisture content somewhere between 30 and 60%. Some woods are wetter than others depending upon the season of cutting and the type of tree. Ash has a relatively low moisture content which combined with it’s medium density and a relative lack of tars probably accounts for it’s reputation as the best firewood of all.

Trying to burn water is going to reduce the efficiency of the combustion as heat is diverted to turning water to steam and the wood resists burning when its too wet so you have to increase the amount of air flowing into the fire and up the chimney which only further reduces heat flowing to where you want it. Steam in the flue combines with the unburnt wood products in the partially combusted smoke and can condense as creosote, with the danger of blocking the flue and causing a chimney fire.

Burning the driest wood you can get makes your fire most efficient, reduces the amount of wood you need to cut (or buy in) and store, saves you time and money and releases less emissions into the atmosphere. Most of all on a really cold night you’ll be cosier and warmer.

There are more ways of cutting, splitting, stacking, seasoning and storing firewood than I could possibly cover in a short post that is already getting too long. But if you have the inclination you can find an old post of mine looking at firewood stacks in Southern Germany here – Firewood stacks of Mahringen pt II.

If you don’t happen to have a spare barn to act as a logstore then it’s no problem to stack the wood outside. The key to drying wood outside is to make the most of the sunshine (as I was reminded recently it dries wood for free and with no carbon emissions) and allow the air to circulate through the stack. I have pallets on the top of this stack to provide an air gap between the wood and the ground sheet which is protecting it from the rain, as well as a raft of old posts on the bottom to improve the drainage.

When you come to burn it, if your firewood is not as dry as you’d like then you can do some simple things to help. Make sure you bring firewood into the house before you want to burn it – preferably stack it by the fire for a day or two if you can do so safely. The smaller you chop the wood the quicker it will dry before you burn it – and the more efficiently it will burn once it’s on the fire.

You’ll find that the lower density woods are easier to dry out in a hurry so if you do have to burn wetter wood than you’d like you’ll find chopping up Ash, Birch, Willow etc into small sticks and drying on top of the stove before burning is a better bet than trying to burn green Oak.

To keep a fire working at optimum efficiency you should be continually adding small pieces of firewood to it. But generally that’s a bit like hard work and we all prefer to put a big log on now and then through the evening. If your fire is just for effect then that’s fine but if you are relying on it to heat the room, house or your water then big logs are bad, and big wet logs are the worst.

 

The combustion is most efficient when just the right amount of air is mixed with the fuel to burn up all of the fuel with the minimum amount of heat escaping through the flue with the water and carbon dioxide. An open fire is normally quite inefficient compared with a stove as it normall draws too much air into the fire and much of the heat is lost into the chimney and more warm air is drawn out of the room. But not all stoves are very efficient and some open fires can be almost as efficient as a stove.

In our living room we have a ‘Jetmaster’ open fire and even though I’ve been using it for 18years I’ve only recently learned that a part of the reason for it’s metal fire box construction is that it has a convector heater built in as room air is drawn under the firebox and up through a void at the back, coming back out through radiating fins at the top of the firebox and into the room as hot air! This, together with the variable damper, can raise the overall efficiency of the fire to 50% – which is exceptionally good for an open fireplace, though nowhere near the 72% of our woodburning stove.

I trust you are all enjoying the warmth of your labours in front of your fires right now!

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Finding Fungi on a Walk in the Woods

I am certainly not a fungi expert but I can’t resist taking a good look and at this time of year there are loads of fungi to choose from. So if anyone has any identifications to offer please feel free to comment.  But yes,  you are right this is just an excuse to post some colourful pictures of the Lynchmere Commons.

Here a Fly Agaric has just appeared from it’s bed of moss. At least I think it’s a Fly Agaric as they are common in the birch woods, but there is no sign of a veil on this one, so I may be leading you astray already. Just shows how difficult it is to follow the identification books.

Very few of the woodland fungi are edible and you really do need to know what you are doing to pick them as a mistake can be highly dangerous. The Fly Agaric is well known for it’s toxic and hallucinogenic properties. It’s one of the Amanita family which include our most toxic fungi so one to beware of.

With a heavy dew the cobwebs glisten in the low angle sun light which seems to give everything deeper colour at this time of year.

These fungi were nestled on the old stump of a birch tree. They look quite similar to Honey Fungus, but then again…maybe not quite.

This one is suspiciously white and clean. I have to say that I don’t know what it is, but as the most toxic fungi in the UK, the Destroying Angel, is also white and clean I tend to leave anything similar well alone even though it’s very likely an innocent pretender (it’s deadly cousin the Death Cap is also similar in appearance though with a greenish tinge to the cap).

The Birch trees are now in their winter plummage and it’s already time to be thinking about harvesting the next crop of bean poles, pea sticks and broom heads.

No idea what these are and even after a quick look through a book I am non the wiser.

Likewise these very small, almost blue ones were just by a beech tree. Even though I couldn’t identify them I did find a Bay Boletus which we took home for tea, but forgot to photograph! Very similar to the Cep or Penny Bun which are also in the Boletus family the Bay Boletus has yellow pores instead of gills which stain blue when touched

Must be about time for a gratuitous Landrover photograph. Surely that’s far too shiny to be one of my Landrovers? Yes we took Puff out for a leisurely Sunday afternoon run as a part of the running in the new engine. The aim is to treat the engine very gently until all of the moving parts have had time to wear in.

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A Walk with Trees in the Wye Valley

This has to be the best time of year for walking in the woods. The display of colours from the Beech trees is magnificent this year and nowhere better than the Forest of Dean where we’ve been for a few days up on the edge of the Wye Valley, but I’m afraid my photos don’t really do the colours justice. Mind you the weather didn’t really cooperate, though warm it’s been dull and dank if not pouring with rain most of the time.

As well as walking through the Forest we explored a few paths up and around the River Wye, through the Gloucestershire countryside and came quite unexpectedly upon an old orchard where management has clearly been on the sparse side for many years. Several of the trees were quite overgrown with Mistletoe – though maybe it’s actually a Mistletoe orchard?

Away from the Forest the footpaths seemed quite thin on the ground and never quite linked up but we did find some great old hedges with lovely ancient oak trees.

This one has grown a monster burr, you can see from the gate in the photo that the burr is a few feet in diameter and it actually reaches most of the way around behind the trunk.

Back in the forest I was (as usual) astounded to see so much lop and top left lying around felling sites, and not just softwood but hardwood as well. On this site several beech trees had just been cut up and left where they were felled. I know I’ll be told that it’s all in aid of biodiversity and the bugs like it, but I mean!  In today’s times of austerity we’re all having to tighten our belts and how many bedrooms does a bug really need?  This is a renewable energy source just wasted and I’m sure that the biodiversity of the site would actually benefit from the removal of some of the excess brash and still leave plenty of spare bedrooms for the bugs!

I suspect it’s all caused by the relentless intensification of forestry during the latter half of the 20th century, very much the same as with agriculture. The more wood you produce the lower the price goes and the more wood you need to produce to keep making money. So you get a bigger loan, buy bigger machines with more computers and GPS that work all day and night to keep paying off the loan and it’s no longer cost effective to remove the brash or even some of the trees.

But it doesn’t have to be like that especially with the price of firewood on the rise. Woodsmen like me keep operating costs down by working for themselves, avoiding loans and using a minimum of equipment. There are plenty of volunteer groups, charcoal burners or firewood operators in Surrey, Sussex and Hampshire who’d be more than happy to clear up sites like this after the contractors leave and reduce our fossil fuel imports and carbon footprint at the same time. I think we ought to be putting pressure on the FC to reintroduce licences for collecting brash and firewood.

Back on the river the sun crept through for just a few minutes. Bizarrely, in view of my previous rant, a small team of tree surgeons were carefully deadwooding some of the river bank willows (lest they fall on the tweed hat of a fly fisherman perhaps?) and then removing all of the wood from the site with a 4×4 and a trailer – from the sublime to the ridiculous?  No bugs welcome on this river bank then?

On the way back I couldn’t resist stopping at a hedgerow full of fat juicy sloes! Normally we only get to pick a few small ones, hard as bullets but these were big soft juicy gobstopper size sloes just demanding to be soaked in Vodkin.

Just a few minutes picking yielded enough for a few litres of Sloe Vodkin and as I write they are in the jars already after a quick session in the freezer just to finish off the softening up process. The jars are Labelled ‘Hole in the Wall’ as we found them on the walk back from a tiny hamlet labelled ‘Hole in the Wall’ on the map, just above Ross-on-Wye.

As we neared the end the sun rushed rapidly down below the horizon, another classic Walk with Trees in the Wye Valley and the Forest of Dean.

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Mowing on the North Downs

‘Transition Town’ and ‘Guildford’ are not concepts that I would normally link together. So I was intrigued to be invited to teach mowing with a scythe in a meadow on the North Downs above Guildford by Transition Town Guildford and Surrey Wildlife Trust.

If you’ve not heard of it before the term ‘Transition Town’ is applied to community based organisations which aim to lead the move towards a lower carbon economy in the local area. The words sustainability and permaculture are often associated with this approach. I hope I’m making sense?

The meadow on the top of the North Downs is an absolute delight as you can see from the photograhs, a riot of wildflowers even at the end of August. The owner of the field, Mark, is keen to keep the field managed traditionally and sustainably and he joined us on the course for the day.

The area is too large to manage with scythe alone so Malcolm was turning the hay with his Massey Ferguson 135 which in its own way is a traditional tool – it was certainly good hay and by cutting at the beginning of September there is maximum benefit to the biodiversity on the site. Eagle eyes will spot Guildford Cathedral in the distance just above the tractor.

We had plenty left to mow by hand and after an introduction and some initial coaching the team soon got stuck into mowing the meadow. Quite hard work as it’s not been mown recently so the sward is varied and quite tussocky in places.

There is often a variety of styles and skills on a course like this, some having mown before – which is not necessarily a good thing, whilst others are unsure of the tool for a while. The boys, of all ages, do tend to use brute force and ignorance at least to start with (and I should know!) but can tire quickly, whilst those who spend some time to develop their technique can benefit through mowing more effectively – as Kate showed us.

By the end of the day we’d made good inroads into the remaining grass with plenty for Malcolm to turn and bale.  I’m very impressed with the start that Transition Town Guildford and Mark Brown have made up on the North Downs – there is a polytunnel producing veg and a small orchard planted as well – and I wish them well with their work. Thanks to John Bannister for the hard work in setting up the course and also to Frances Halstead and Surrey Wildlife Trust for supporting the day.

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Lynchmere Common – Fallen Birch

The Lynchmere commons covers 300 acres of mixed heathland and woodland on the edge of West Sussex between Haslemere and Liphook. In 1998 the commons were purchased from the Cowdray Estate by a local society (The Lynchmere Society). At that time the commons were almost entirely very poor scrub woodland with only remnants of heath. Over the last 10 years a lot of progress has been made in clearing scrub and restoring areas of lowland heath with much of the work being carried out by volunteers.

 

I started working on the commons as a volunteer in 2000 to get experience in conservation work and as stress relief. I enjoyed it so much that now I help to manage the commons. Clearing fallen trees from paths and fencelines is one part of what I do on the commons. The wet weather this year has caused a lot of problems for trees. At some times of the year tree clearing can be on a regular basis especially with all the birch trees growing on the poor heathland soil (upper greensand of the Western Weald).

 

But the birch I cleared this morning had fallen because of a fungus in its roots. I think its a Ganoderma applanatum (or Artist’s Fungus) but I will be very happy to hear from anyone who can offer a more accurate diagnosis. Ganoderma rots the roots and base of the tree so it will fall very easily. You can see the bracket in the photo – brown top with white margin and white underside.

 

From the stump you can see the rot was quite well advanced in the base of the trunk (click on the image to enlarge it). Very little sound wood remained so the tree snapped off just above the base. This one went only a foot above the ground but when it pivots a few feet off the ground while being cut down its called a widow’s seat or barber’s chair , both references to the danger of being caught behind it when it goes.
As it happens I wanted some fresh birch for turning this week as I have some wood turning to do and some hook tools that were worked on at the weekend to try out. I managed to find a few lengths of the tree that might be useful for turning, the rest will go onto the firewood pile.

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