Three of us at the coppicing today -- 3 saws, one blunt lopper, 3 safety helmets and 1 hi-viz vest. 2 litres of cola, 1 handcart, 1 clipboard and a badge to say we weren't wood thieves. The tree was a multi-stemmed hazel about 4 metres tall that had long outgrown its last coppicing and was poking into the branches of the oak above it. The group leader and her last volunteer had taken out half the branches already. We demolished the rest fairly quickly, with OH taking the first shift and me the next. The rest of the afternoon was taken up with sawing the logs, loading up the handcart and dragging them up the path and back towards the car -- a good half-mile -- three times.
But we also saw quite a bit of wildlife, such as this grass snake, curled on a branch just off the ground.
When we had loaded up our car with what felt like half the forest (but which was probably only about a third of a cubic metre), OH and I went foraging in the other direction.
This is our haul:
Crab apples for a hedgerow jelly.
Sloes for sloe gin, one of OH's party specials.
We also spotted this beefsteak fungus on the same oak that had one last year:
These edible bracket fungi are also called ox tongue. Their meat looks like real beef. But as we were already planning on eating the rest of OH's delicious fish pie, we left it where it was, hopefully to spawn many more brackets.
Then it was time to go home and ask my lower back if it was still on speaking terms with me (ow...).
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