For the last four weeks we have experienced amazing weather for Irish standards. Everything frozen and white. The trees looked so beautiful. It brought many hardships with it, and many of us had to change the way we usually did things. For us on the farm, filling water for the cattle (and for neighbour’s cattle) [...]
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A whirl of white as the branches and twigs grow a coat of frozen snow.
Alder twigs, seed long since dispersed, making lovely patterns in the snow.
But the ground feeding birds need hedges and trees to find their food.
……. And little patches of wildness…..
It’s doubtful if we’d have much of a forest at all in what we call The Cabin Woods if we hadn’t used tree sleeves to protect them at planting stage. One friend from Wales said when he was visiting here “The hares are the size of a small pony!”
Well, - that’s a slight exaggeration, - [...]
Last summer I ran an informal workshop on the farm on the subject of tending young woodlands. About twenty people turned up on the Saturday morning. The deal was that in the morning I’d show people through the woods and offer what I have learned about tending the woods. After lunch we would do some [...]
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, [...]
There is a strip of woodland between the lane down to the Cabin Woods and the home field, where the cattle are at the moment. We planted it about 7 years ago for shelter and shade and to link the woods behind the house with the main woodland areas that we planted about ten years [...]
Hazel catkin braving the snow
Out walking along our avenue yesterday I noticed many of the hazel trees have released their catkins. To me, this is always the first sign of spring. It’s amazing to think that in this freezing, snowy weather, beneath the surface the soil is beginning to stir. The trees are the first [...]
This evening I walked down to the Cabin woods to stack a bit more of the firewood cut by Niall last week. It was such a cold evening, but bright, and I took a look around the little forest where the trees had been thinned.
I like to leave the branches from the harvested trees [...]
Yesterday evening I wandered down to the Cabin Woods with my red marking tape and worked my way through the trees marking those that I thought should be felled. I made a mental note at the end of last summer that some thinning needed to happen down there before this spring. The Cabin Woods is [...]
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