Back from my September trip to Devon and Dorset for the Smallwoods AGM and Hardy’s Cottage, October has mostly been about firewood. I brought trailer loads back home from Century Wood where I had cut it last winter, and then split and dried it in the Barn.
Back at home I’ve been extending the log store to store more here, including firewood that friends and neighbours don’t want to buy immediately. I needed to get rid of a stack of scrap wood from an old garden shed to make space for this, and we decided to take it to Century Wood in the empty trailer trips and have an October bonfire. October is the anniversary of my first visit to the wood in October 2007 and we mark it with a bonfire some years.
The firewood is a mix of hazel, wych elm, ash, and alder. All growing from natural regeneration between the rows of planted poplars. The wood produces far more than I could harvest even if I was working it seriously, and so I’m trying to use any form of conventional coppicing. I’m not trying to grow straight poles and 8 inch firewood logs are fine even from a very curved thick stem. What I do is more like Coppice Selection, which used to be a common across Europe: you pick the stems that are the right thickness and let the others carry on growing.
The first of these two pictures shows an area of managed coppice in Thorncombe Wood in Dorset that I visited in September: lots of stools close together, competing for light, and growing pretty straight. The second photo of stools regrowing after being cut in February this year, already about five feet high.
This year has a been very good for fungi and Century Wood is no exception.
One of this summer’s jobs was to paint the interior of the Log Cabin and build some shelves. I’ve also updated the electrics, including a new solar controller ready for a LiFePO4 batteries, and provided sockets for charging from my petrol generator as well as the solar panels. In August I got a StarLink Mini dish and I added an external socket to power that too, with a switch inside the Cabin to make it easier to power down the dish overnight. I used a scaffolding bracket and a hinged joint to hold the scaffolding pole the dish goes up on in place more securely.
Century Wood is in the Shawbury RAF helicopter training area and during the week we often have visitors. The biggest one in October was a Chinook roaring over the southern part of the wood!
This autumn I’m planning an extension to the Barn to create a covered walkway from the side door of the Barn to the Cabin door. I’m going there more often on days with rain to work in the Barn or even use Starlink to get other work done when the rain arrives, and a walkway with a roof will make that easier and mean less mud gets walked into the Cabin.