A whole growing season has elapsed since my last blog post. Having toddlers to look after seems to make time fly by! So, in summary: Flowers started to appear. Leaves came. The woodland turned green. Blooms of various shades of blue, white, yellow, pink and purple burst open in their annual sequence over the spring, summer and early autumn months. Butterflies fluttered, birds chirped, bees buzzed and two small children toddled about. Then the days started to shorten. Bracken turned to bronze and the birches went golden, their leaves fluttering down like snowfall in any waft of breeze.
The chilly mornings, earthy aromas and dewy spider webs of early autumn signal that it is time to get back working in the woods, and this autumn, after a two-year break, it was time to get back to it. The first job was to extract some timber from thinnings that I had felled almost three years ago. It had been left lying in the wood because priorities had changed after I became pregnant with the twins. This was a good opportunity to test out using the tractor and forestry winch mounted on the back.
Learning the ropes on the winch
During August I did three days of winch training with Donald Maclean here at Comar Wood, in order to learn how to use the winch safely and efficiently. A friend had very kindly lent me his winch to use while I don’t yet have my own. Earlier in the summer I also recruited a few helpers who were keen to come and work with me in the wood. One of them, Steve, came along to the winch training.
Before the training I had always been a bit nervous driving the tractor and although knew the principles of winching, lacked confidence. Now I feel much happier, having been shown safe methods for operating these big machines. Harnessing their power will help me with my ambitions for the wood, but this power also demands a healthy respect.
The winch is mounted on the back of the tractor and draws its power from the tractor PTO (power take off). This winch has a 5 tonne capacity which is more than enough for the size of logs we have to pull out at the moment. It has a drum of 70m of wire rope. The rope has to be pulled out manually from the winch to the log. The log is then choked – a chain or length of rope is wrapped round the end of the log in such a way that it tightens onto the log when pulled. This is then attached to the winch rope. The winch operator engages the clutch and the winch pulls the rope – and the log. Since the log is being dragged on the ground there is the risk of it catching on roots or stumps and these have to be negotiated. Several logs can be choked individually and then dragged together by attaching their chokers to sliders on the winch rope.
The way in which the trees have been felled can make a big difference to the efficiency of the extraction (winching) process and this will become important with bigger trees and logs that cannot be manhandled as easily. Logs need to be presented pointing in the direction they are to be pulled and with a clear route through the remaining standing trees. This is usually done by using a system of racks for thinning – clear rows along which logs can be extracted.
So, having completed the training, Steve and I proceeded to pull out as many of the felled logs as we could. In the process we learnt more about the practicalities of the method and how easy it can be for logs to get stuck behind obstacles. We were pulling out long lengths of timber (whole tree trunks, albeit from very skinny trees). We then cross-cut these into 3m lengths and stacked them next to the track ready to be forwarded out of the wood (I’m paying someone else to do the forwarding at the moment as I don’t yet have a trailer). Finally moving these logs felt good and it was great to be able to try out the winch.
Once we’d finished our winching the winch had to go back to its owner. By this point we were well into autumn and it was time to start some felling.
Felling spruce once again
We started by felling a small coupe of spruce next to a wee burn. This was an area of spruce that also contained a fair few birch trees, as well as one or two alder, bird cherry and rowan. The spruce trees had not grown very well for some reason and were mostly short but bushy. They were never going to make decent timber trees, so I had decided to clear this half-acre of its spruce. The birch and other native trees, which were mainly towards the burn and the top edge, were left to form native woodland cover. The remainder of the compartment is now clear of trees and will be able to regenerate with different species.
Most of the spruce trees were felled up the hill into one of two ‘racks’, to allow extraction up to the track with the winch. The stems were snedded (branches removed) but left full length to be winched up and will then be cross-cut and stacked ready for forwarding out of the woodland. We finished felling the coupe just before Christmas and extraction will hopefully commence in January. The photos below give some ‘before and after’ shots of the site.
My management strategy for the woodland is to remove the spruce trees through thinning and then small-scale felling like here (see this post for more detail on the management strategy). Apart from round the house, this is the first coupe within the woodland where the spruce trees have been cleared, so it is an experiment and should help me understand the practicalities of doing this elsewhere. The idea is that by clearing small areas and leaving the surrounding trees, the coupe is opened up sufficiently to allow regeneration of light-demanding species such as oak and birch, but remains sheltered and closely connected to mature woodland cover, with partially shaded micro-climates, creating a mosaic of woodland habitats.
Whilst this coupe will naturally regenerate, I intend to supplement this with planting. I wish to maintain this area as productive woodland as it is easily accessible. I have not yet decided which species to plant, but am considering hazel, alder and/or willow for coppice, or else birch and alder for timber and firewood. The areas under the existing native trees and by the burn will be left and hopefully the native ground flora will flourish here with the increased light levels. It will be very interesting to see how the woodland responds to my intervention.
The next felling job will be thinning some of the adjacent stands of spruce, where the trees have grown better (where I started removing the smallest trees back in early 2020 – see here). This will provide space for the decent trees to grow bigger, allow more light to the woodland floor and open up around some of the old birch trees that are still growing among the spruce. Lee and I started this thinning just after Christmas and I will report back on progress over the next three months!
Meanwhile, we are enjoying the wintry, snowy weather and the magic that the combination of ice, snow and a low winter sun can bring to the woodland. Wishing everyone a happy new year filled with flourishing trees, woods and gardens!
Not that there isn’t enough to do, but those pines desperately need to be branched up. The small branches radically reduce the quality of the lumber.
This is what they used to do for the small wood for kitchen fires back 1,000 years, with long poles, hooks and today, saws, now long forgot.
Have to add how easy you’ve got it with a long winch compared to how we used to go in with an old Allis Chalmers and back up to each log with a chain, but as you well know it’s already more than enough work just to walk to each log and grab it. It makes lumber seem a bargain and you’re getting paid $5/hr for such deadly labor.
With such tiny logs, it may make sense to put the winch on a trailer instead and be able to pull them all up at once to take on the road. A normal equipment trailer would work, but need a high rack on the front so the winch can get reach and angle. But everything costs money, could you ever get return on that investment?
The planting is certainly like Civilian Corps (or whatever they have there) right into the field, years ago. Trees too close together, branched as they had light when young. That’s fine, but you can see the drawback. Now that someone has set the stage, it’s easy to thin through, add diversity and get better logs, exactly as you plan. Just mentioning as a wood man because casual observers don’t see this when they see the pictures but it’s instant and obvious to me, and the exact year it happened.
Greetings from the ‘States.
Thanks for your comment, it’s good to hear your thoughts!
Yes it would be great to brash/prune the better trees to improve the quality but as you say, it’s another job and to my knowledge there isn’t actually a premium for these logs, usually sold to big sawmills (unless I could find someone who wanted to buy some better quality spruce logs). I will definitely focus on quality timber in the areas I eventually replant with other species.
Your trailer idea is interesting! I haven’t heard of that. The problem with equipment is that it’s all expensive and there isn’t one thing that is perfect for all situations so it’s a sort of compromise between cost and what will work best for the majority of the site. It’s been good borrowing a winch before deciding what to buy.
You’re right about the planting, it’s a typical spruce plantation. It was actually done privately back in the 1980s when people could get tax breaks for turning land to commercial forestry, but once planted, there were no financial incentives for looking after it so it was never thinned. It’s just been left for 35 years, hence why trying to thin it now is quite challenging!
Glad to see you back on line.
Thank you
HI Carolyn, Just found your blog when searching for any positive comments in the UK on sitka spruce after a dog walker in our woodland said to me with great vehemence, “I hate sitka spruce.” You are so right – there is nothing the matter with the tree, it’s the way it was grown here last century. In our Highland woodland it was the only tree that would grow for about five years before we got the deer population under some sort of control. Heart-breaking to grow pine from seed to have it all eaten within the year, while the sitka flourishes.
Hi Val, thanks for your comment. I’m glad you found my blog and it’s good to hear someone else appreciates some of the positive aspects of spruce. But yes, it is frustrating that it’s the one tree that the deer leave alone whilst eating everything else!