Late August is a good time to visit the forests and do some marking before the leaves fall in another couple of months. Many foresters I’ve met with Pro Silva Europe don’t need the trees to be in leaf to know when one crown is crowding out another. For the less experienced of us though, it helps when the crowns are in full leaf so as to see who’s crowding who and when the crowns of the future trees/really great trees, need to be freed up.
The fast pioneering alder trees have really put on growth and the Cabin Woods were again getting darker and darker. New light needed to come in and some thinning needed to happen. I marked four trees and when Niall Miller came to help out with some other work, he felled the trees and harvested the firewood for me.
Niall Miller getting ready for some more sawing. Working in woodlands is what Niall has done most for more than twenty years.
When we planted this woodland ten years ago we put in four different varieties of alder: common, grey, red and Italian. It’s a good chance to see how the different species have done. I favoured any native alder that came in by itself and now there is a reasonable variety of stem sizes in this very young woodland. The alder varieties all have different characteristics. One thing they have in common is that they all grow fast.
Four trees were cut: Grey, common and Italian alder. Notice the different colours of the freshly cut timber.
The beauty of owning small, young woodlands is that the ideal ‘little and often’ guidlelines for thinning can be easily applied. Now the crowns have more room to fill which means that the increment or growth will be kept high.
A few days after Niall had been here I had a visit from my good friends artist Cathy Fitzgerald and sculptor Martin Lyttle. Martin and Cathy were telling me that their own little alder woodland also needs thinning as the canopy has again closed over. You can read about their conifer forest in transformation on Cathy’s blogsite.
Cathy & Martin standing in newly made light after thinning in the Cabin Woods
Notice how bright it is in the woods now that the little bit of thinning has been done. By now the brambles are completely tame and there is very little to do in this small woodland except fell some of the larger trees every couple of years. There is a little regeneration of ash and alder coming in, despite the family of huge hares we have resident on the farm. It should be enough.
It’s truly amazing to walk through this area now and experience just how firm the ground is after all the torrential rain. Before the trees it was very wet and rushy. Much more productive under trees and a wonderland to walk through and enjoy at any time of the year. 
Tags: Jan's Farm Forest
