Well, what a five months it's been. Our last post was in celebration of Herbie's winning performance in woodland.co.uk's 'Woodland Best of ' competition in the Best Woodland Dog category. This was posted on October 30th 2019. The rain had started in mid October, and was to continue until mid March 2020, making it extremely difficult to get much work done at Old Copse. What a very good thing it was to have the cabin to retreat to when the drizzle became a downpour.
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| Basking in the Spring Sunshine, March 2020 |
Our main projects for the winter months were to do a modest amount of tree planting - no more than 100, and then to concentrate on the long neglected overstood hazel coppice at the south end of Old Copse. Sussex Lund supported this project by giving us a generous grant, and we planned to finish it by Spring 2020. Far too optimistic as it turned out. We underestimated the amount of hazel pollarding and holly felling needed.Our highly skilled and loyal forester who had helped us with our various Old Copse projects for eight years, announced that he and his wife were emigrating to Canada, and sadly couldn't help us this time. So in between downpours we've been doggedly felling pollarding and clearing, on our own. There's still a lot to do but we've now stopped for the bird nesting season . Sussex Lund don't mind that project completion will be put back a year, so we're hoping for a drier 2020/2021 work season.
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| Some of the overstood Hazel waiting to be pollarded and protected from the deer |
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| On the left a hazel and holly woodpile seasoning for next winter. On the right, a pollarded hazel protected from the deer. |
Tree planting also took a hit from the endless rain. We just managed to get the last of the tree whips in the ground before the end of the planting season. The tree nursery was inundated by the heavy rains and were unable to lift and despatch them until a week ago.
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| Everything needed for a tree planting session: spade, stakes, hammer, tree shelters, stapler and a bag of trees. |
A few wild daffodils together with primroses, lily of the valley and wood anenome, have started to spring up in new places in the wood, indicating that we're doing something right as we open the canopy and clear the bracken.
Last weekend's unusually strong north winds brought down another huge beech limb, which took out a couple of scots pines as it fell. The result is a hung up mess which will need to be sorted out at some point.
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| A Scots pine fell and squashed a load of holly, which saves us a bit of work. |
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| There won't be much left of this Veteran Beech if any more limbs fall off. |
The surface of the wood is looking surprisingly dry, which seems strange after months of constant rain. We are just hoping that five months of rain won't be followed by six months of drought, which would not be good for the prospects of new plantings, or the fruit and vegetable enclosure if we can't be here to water it. Which brings us to the final woodland fly in the ointment: the 'virus' and its effect on people's normal, everyday movements. At present we are still travelling to the wood, but soon we might not be able to do this. So the wood will have to get along without us. This isn't such a terrible thing as Old Copse will continue on its own without our help as it always does. But we would miss it very much.
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| Aah, Spring again in beautiful Old Copse. |
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