Aggggggghhhhhhh those deer

See what those fallow deer do 😦

Last Tuesday a visit to the Four Acre woodland via Cambridge Road Farm revealed some very bad news; the fallow deer had passed by. It must have been the group of bucks we saw when out stalking the day before, as about 20 of the newly planted trees at Cambridge Road Farm had been vandalised and they had left evidence in the form of great big hoof prints. Fallow roam over a much greater territory than the muntjac and can cover thousands of hectares, so they are quite

Fallow hoof print

hard to control without the co-operation of the neighbouring landowners. It is rather annoying that the fallow bucks seem to find all new planted trees and their guards targets of aggression; sometimes you can go into a wood with naturally growing saplings and planted saplings with guards but they only choose to beat up those that are planted.

Last week’s weather was very Spring-like, the ground was drying out nicely and even the honey bees were making excursions into the countryside.

The old boiler, very dead

Yes, Spring had come. Ouch! what a shock on Saturday to wake up and find a whole heap of snow on the ground, not only that, the Hall had no heating and IT WAS FREEZING. Why was there no heating in the Hall? Well the boiler had finally decided to give up the ghost. On Thursday the forestry team could see that the two men installing the new boiler were going to have their work cut out, so we offered some help to get the new boiler bits into the Hall. Wow! these “bits” weighed 110kg

The new boiler 🙂

EACH! All 10 had to go ’round to the front of the Hall and through a window. Next thing was to get the old boiler bits out, these were not so clean…. Job jobbed.  We left them to get on with putting the bits together and …just maybe… there will be heating in the house, just a shame we couldn’t go green and used woodchip. Next time…..

Other jobs included planting in Four Acre after we had removed some of the felled timber; can’t get it out of the wood as the

Pulling out the cable

ground is still too wet, so the winch and tractor are moving the larger pieces of timber just outside of the planting area. At the end of the blog is a video of Neil operating the winch. The winch is an Igland 6 ton winch with a dozer blade that digs in as the winch pulls the log. This lump was over 4 tons so the poor old tractor could not pull it. In this case we either cut it in half or, if we wish to keep it longer (to make long beams), we release the cable and drive the tractor another 50m and then winch in the log again.

Removing metal stakes

One other job that need doing in Four Acre was the removal of the last metal tree stakes from a much earlier tree planting. These had been put in over 15 years ago and, although we had removed most of the metal stakes, some had got stuck in the young trees. Not wishing to leave them there (because the trees would eventually incorporate them into their trunks and make any future felling nearly impossible), we used a most cunning implement to remove them. It wasn’t that cunning…. just a pole and lever with chain. Took two of them all day to get these last few out and unfortunately there are other areas with the same problem. DON’T ever use metal stakes to hold the tree guards up, you’ll regret it, use wooden or bamboo ones.