The weather over the last week has been glorious, warm sunny days and cooler nights. Everything in the wood seems to be in overdrive to grow as fast and as tall as it can. Spaces that were seemingly empty have erupted into waist high nettles and piles of wood that stood out have been subsumed into the green advance.
Talking of green advance, the container box has now reached the top of the wood. The plan will be to use it as a base for some wood working including some planking of trees that have already been felled. Josh and I had a last push, or rather pull, to get it into place yesterday. very to have moved what seemed like an immovable object some 400 feet up through a woodland using only a winch and some bits of wood with grease on them. Also very pleasing to look back at the route and see that we didn’t have to take any trees out, damage any of the low lying branches or leave scar on the ground (or ourselves)!
It was a reasonably hot day and so wearing shorts seemed like a very sensible decision. That was until after a couple of trips through some nettles as the set up and used the winch. The nettle stings are uncomfortable as they happen but not hugely unpleasant, what is weird is the way that the sustained tingling goes on well into the evening and even the following morning. I wonder if they have any beneficial effect in the same way that bee stings are meant to be good for rheumatism? I bet the beneficial effect there is that the bee sting simply takes your mind off your rheumatic aches and pains.
Here’s a video taken from the top walking back down the route that the container took.
The sessile oak tree saplings that I was given back in April have settled down and are growing nicely. I built deer proof cages around them to try and protect them from the nibbling hordes and so far this approach seems to have been effective. The recent dry spell doesn’t seem to have harmed them but with the cool nights there is still quite a lot of early morning dew and I think this is providing sufficient water for their needs. The only maintenance necessary has been to clear way competing nettles and grasses so that the saplings have room to catch the light and flourish. Here’s hoping.
Just as we prepared to leave the wood yesterday evening we heard a buzzing sound. Really difficult to pin it down and we wandered around for a few minutes trying to make out where it was coming from. Eventually we narrowed it down to one tree and there in the bright evening sunshine just above one of the tree canopies was a mass of flying insects. Not sure what species of insect they were or why they would be swarming. A few years a go I have saw a colony of bees land on an old barn where I worked and that was amazing. The swarm yesterday didn’t seem as concentrated as that but maybe what we saw was the start of a mass movement rather than the destination. The sound is very difficult to capture on a video/camera and so are the images but here is an attempt.
More next time…………
Tim Burr 