Yesterday I took the tractor and trailer round to gather some piles of firewood I’d felled and cut up in January and February. Some of these were right next to the rides and easy to get to, but a couple were way off any of the rides behind tangles of brambles and fallen branches. Despite this, I was able to get the tractor in by finding a roundabout route since it’s narrow enough to get through gaps and has enough power to get over smaller logs and stumps.
Last week the Woodlanders group on Facebook passed the 10,000 members mark – and they sent us this rather garish image to use! Now is a good time to look back and think about the aims of the group.
It started back in February 2018 with the observation that Facebook had become the main forum where people talked about woodlands and forestry, with web boards and mailing lists dying out, and other big platforms like Reddit not getting a look in. But what was really striking was how people with a stake in woodlands and forestry were in “bubbles” and not talking to each other. Often, not even aware of each other.
Read More »Woodlanders Facebook GroupThis is the third in a series of videos about finding and about buying your own woodland. Here I talk about some Do’s and Don’ts for your first year of ownership.
Read More »“The first year in your woodland” videoThis has been a week of flooding in Shropshire and much of the rest of the country. At Century Wood, the water levels have been higher as they usually are in winter, and our seasonal ponds where the water table breaks through the surface, are back.
Here are two contrasting photos of one of the boundary ditches: on the left, to show the depth of the ditch, here it is empty during the drought year of 2011 when I believe water was diverted for irrigation; and almost overflowing this week. That fallen log is the standing tree with the fork in the 2011 photo.
There is normally a foot or two of water in that ditch all year round. This next photo is of another drainage ditch which is normally dry but fills up and then starts flowing when there are floods. A bit back from the ditch is a dead tree with orange fruiting bodies from the fungi consuming the rotting timber inside. The fungus is something like Velvet Shank.
Read More »Wet woodland
After the snow fall at the end of November 2021 I walked around the National Trust’s Dunham Massey estate in Cheshire, mostly in the oak… Read More »Snow walk through Dunham Massey
The release of Denis Villeneuve’s wonderful film of the first half of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” has coincided with the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, but few reviewers have made the connection because the book’s ecological themes are largely absent from the screen version.
The toilet shed was the first building I put up at the wood, way back in 2009. This post talks through the original design with photos I took at the time. All before it was ever used in case you’re worried 🙂 In short, it’s an off grid composting toilet set up with separate chambers and seats for liquids vs solids+liquids.
I based the building on a shed kit from Tiger Sheds. It’s an 8ft by 6ft apex shed which cost ÂŁ248 in 2009. Since 2009 the average price rise across the economy has only been about 30%, but timber has sky rocketed. The equivalent shed now costs over ÂŁ700!
Read More »Off Grid Toilet at Century Wood
This week Century Wood received Grown in Britain certification. This allows us to display the red, blue and green logo here on the website and in association with firewood if I start selling it in the future.
One of the attractive features of coppice selection is that you can do it at any time of the year. It’s even less seasonal than… Read More »Summer firewood at Century Wood
Last month I attended the RFS “intermediate level silviculture” one day course run by Julian Evans at his wood, Northdown Plantation, near Overton in Hampshire. I read his book “A wood of our own” in October 2007 before I bought Century Wood, and it was part of my decision to buy a wood. I’ve said before that it’s “the book I compare other woodland owners’ books against”. So it was very special to finally visit the wood itself.
There were two dozen of us there on the day: a mixture of small woodland owners like me; staff of wildlife trusts, the National Trust, and Windsor Great Park; and independent forestry consultants. The RFS helpfully provide Continuing Professional Development certificates for courses like this to people who need them.
Read More »Visiting Northdown Plantation