Wordless Wednesday - May Day walk in the wood.

 

Snow!

Well, they were right! Lots of snow fell on Friday  on us, (well lots for here in the UK, at least)


We are having to keep the bird feeders stocked up - not much else for the poor things to eat at the moment.

Cassi Cat seems unbothered by the snow and came out with me as usual.

Very pretty, very cold.

Looking down into the wood - very Narnia - like.

You can see our roof is well insulated! No snow melt.

Disgusted hens - they refused to come out of the run.

Cassi looking in at the hens

Pretty.

Woodburners

We are about to start on gutting the sitting room and insulating its walls and replacing the woodburner and a whole lot more stuff.  

 So today we had a trip out to look at new woodburners at the Gloucestershire Stove Centre. We currently have a rather useless metal box of a woodburner which really is so hopeless that it is not much better than an open fire...

I was certain we would be going for a Clearview to replace it but Compostman suggested a trip out, so off we went.

The shop and staff were lovely and happily lit a number of the stoves for us to see. We saw a number of makes and are now deliberating between two brands. Both are lovely ( and neither are a Clearview!) Both are more efficient than a Clearview and a lot less money as well!

here is the link to one of them

http://www.navitron.org.uk/product_detail.php?proID=501&catID=85

The Burley was astoundingly good in demonstration and actually cheaper that a "conventional" equivalent woodburner with air wash and cleanburn, a la Clearview...which it also has, of course

Also very clean, unfussy lines, which we liked...I was SO impressed by it...


Given that we fell, cut, split and stack all our wood, getting max efficiency from it for heating is of considerable importance!

‎89% is the 5 kW, 85 % is the 8 kW and the 12 kW The 12 kW is astonishingly hot, even in a huge industrial unit, it is hard to stand nearer than 6 ft away.....the flame pattern is amazing, think "Northern Lights" effect with sheets of burning gas dropping down from the top of the glass door to meet the gouts of flame shooting up from the wood in the grate.

I was mesmerised....

The Burley turns 100 Kg of wood into a pt beer glass of ash...

The Burley does primary, secondary combustion ( as does a Clearview) but also goes on into gasification territory to do tertiary and quaternary...as you adjust the air intake you see astonishing flame fronts.

Closest thing I have ever seen to compare it to, was looking into furnaces !

I really thought we were Clearview buyers...we have been waiting to do this room for a couple of years while we do other stuff to the house and had money put aside for a Clearview, but now we are blown away by the Burley

 

Woodland wonderland in pictures

Here are some pictures of our woodland. It is looking particularly beautiful at the moment :-)



Cowslips and Bluebells



More Bluebells



An Early Purple Orchid in the wood.



Yet more Bluebells! They have been spreading throughout the wood year on year as we thin the trees, coppice and generally manage the woodland for maximum wildlife and nature benefit. It also means we get wood in return, which is what a sustainable managed wood is all about, to my mind!


I LOVE this time of year, I am soooooo busy and it is a mad time, what with planting and sowing seeds and tending the veg plot and garden and mowing and compost digging...and also doing much the same at school with the childen....

but I LOVE it all:-)

A chair!

My amazingly talented artist friend Tamsin came and cut some hazel from our wood a few weeks ago...and LOOK what she has done with it!




Tamsin takes commissions to make chairs.....

Wood

Compostman has been busy in the wood over the last few weeks, felling some dead trees and turning them into logs. He has made further space to store logs in the lean-to, using the pallets I "liberated" from a skip. Yes those pallets, the ones I injured my shoulder getting!
Still he has put them to good use and made another bay for the logs, so we now have 3 bays, one for "burn now", one for "one year old" wood and one for "felled this season".

We leave the felled logs to dry for a bit as big logs sometimes, or sometimes Compostman cuts them into woodburner lengths and leaves them in a pile in the wood to dry a bit, before bringing them in to stack up under cover.

So the wood is either ready to burn now, ready Winter 2008 or Winter 2009 depending on which bay you look at.

I do like a nice pile of wood!

Apple tree pruning and other tree stuff..........

This fine, dry weather has made the sap start to rise in the trees!! and has made pruning the apple trees an imperative...so today compostman and I were doing just that!!




and felling a Silver Birch inthe garden which had gotten a little TOO huge..and was overshadowing the fruit trees and vegetable garden...so sadly it had to come down

Still it made lots of lovely logs for the woodburner and lots of lovely shreddings for the compost bins and as mulch in the garden!!

Digging the Veg patch, making room for more logs AND Heritage seeds!!

As we have had such sunny weather, the ground has begun to dry out and be ok for turning over so here is the freshly dug parsnip bed.
We LIKE Parsnips at Compost Mansions!!

I usually grow Chase Organics "Tender and True" and "Avonresister"...both very good varieties. I grow some in loo roll tubes and dig a deep hole and transplant the whole loo roll into the ground when the parsnip seed has germinated, as well as some seeds planted direct into the ground.

Also as compostman has been cutting down trees and tall shrubs lately he has been tidying up the log store....

And has made a new bay for new wood..the other 2 bays are "2+ year old" and "one +year old" ....we are currently burning the 2+ stuff and very good it is, too...












I have also been sending our some of my saved seeds to various friends...I am a member of Garden Organic's Heritage Seed Library and every winter I get to choose some endangered seeds from an extensive selection...I grow and eat them AND I save seed from them...and I share them with friends, school...ANYONE who is willing to grow them and protect them..as long as no one is making commercial profit from them its great ( and commercial profit is OK, too, but Garden Organic need to get a cut!!)

I LOVE the HSL "Purple Giant" and "Canadian" climbing French Beans..we have given up growing Runner Beans in preference to these as they are SO good and freeze SO well!!
Also Tomato "Aunty Madge" and "Black Russian" and Leek "Colossal" These are WONDERFUL old varieties and deserve to be kept alive...but if no one grows them, as they are no longer commercially available, they will die out.

SO...JOIN GO'S Seed Library and GET GROWING HERITAGE SEED!!!!

oooh I love tidying my garden!!

Am having to do quite heavy work with compostman on this border...a VERY overgrown Buddleia Davidii Alba, a "Tennis Ball Tree" and Hamamelis vernalis a Witch hazel have taken over and are seriously getting in the way .....so some EXTREME pruning was called for......cue compostman and his chainsaw!!
This is one of the beds where I need to deal with the rat nest and tunnels...I am going to dig out any tunnel and hole I find...that should upset them enough that they go elsewhere in the garden for a bit, at least...
Here are some roses which had got a bit out of hand in one bed..so they had to go, too!! I must admit, I like Roses BUT I regard them as an awful waste of time...SO much effort for only a few weeks of beauty...ah well I expect there is some deep seated "zen" reason why I still make space for them....

We got 4 wheelbarrows of small logs off this pruning plus a couple of barrowloads of big logs ...so worth doing as it runs the woodburner for a few days on that

And then the trusty shredder ( a Bosch ATX 2200...amazing machine!!!!!) produced barrowloads of wonderful shredded wood...its great as a mulch and its WONDERFUL to mix in with the compost bin stuff!!!

...and also the shreddings are really useful to mulch under the shrub beds to keep the weeds down...( even if the hens DO think the mulch is just there for THEIR benefit!!!!!)

Finally an bonfire for all the bitty bits we can't shred or compost....and its a nice thing to sit by at the end of a hard days work.......

Clear view now!

Some pictures from tree felling today. We have LOTS of trees and some of them have grown too big and are blocking the view or starting to cause various problems, so we cut them down and use them for heating . This is GOOD as it saves us burning (fossil) fuel oil.

BUT it does mean chopping down perfectly nice trees sometimes which are just in the " wrong place"...which is a little sad for us.

BUT we DO have 3 acres of trees like it.......about 1200 trees in all...so there are plenty more for the wildlife!!


So mr cw got togged up in his chainsaw PPE took chainsaw in hand and " did the deed"...This was the view before


and this is the view after.. we now have a clear view over the fields to the Ridge in the distance


And the Hens "helped" as is usual!!