The Trees of Paradise

“Working in Paradise,” the site warden said.  Depending on one’s theological viewpoint, it could be argued that ‘working in Paradise’ is a contradiction in terms.

No-one, however, could dispute the fact that this morning we were in Paradise (Wood).  And that it was a great deal more restful than the ‘Elysian fields’ of a certain capital city, which a number of us had been to/through recently:  

Avenue des Champs-Élysées, Paris
– flags are for even more extravagant 8 May celebrations than usual, in 2015

Mind you, la cœur ouvert à l’inconnu (‘the heart ready for the unexpected’) is a good principal for approaching Green Gym.  Or pretty much anything else in life, come to that?

Nor could it be denied that a great deal of fun was had while working not for money, but almost for the sheer sake of it – certainly for the physical-exercise benefit.  That’s Green Gym, where Every 1’s a Winner.

From a recycling and energy-conservation perspective, our mission had a noble purpose.  This was how the site warden explained the task officially:

To extract timber from the wood which was felled last winter

This will heat the Earth Trust offices next winter, after seasoning in one of our barns for the summer.

The unofficial explanation was that this is a Good Thing, because the bio-mass boiler at the Earth Trust Centre keeps office staff warm.  Which means they do the paperwork.  Which in turn means that other staff, who do not like paperwork, can be outside doing fun things such as extracting timber from woodland. 

The first unexpected item on the agenda was that when he arrived, the site warden announced that he had “something interesting” in the back of the pick-up.  It turned out to be this:

Fox cub, killed on the road

The body could not have been lying on the road for more than about 4 hours, and was otherwise undamaged; so it would be passed on to a colleague who was into tanning, and would use the skin (and decently dispose of the rest).

The second surprise: a new set of tools to play with.  Timber tongs, as demonstrated here, were certainly a new one on me, and did indeed prove useful for moving some of the larger logs:

The third surprise: small tractor in the way.  Our first job of the morning was to move logs (right of picture) on to trailer (left of picture) – but not before the trailer had been cleared of small tractor.  There appeared to be some difficulty starting the motor:

Then there was the business of safely manoeuvring small tractor down the ramp, with the help of a banksman:

We spectators were, unkindly, wondering if these photographs would be posted on the blog with the caption ‘What happened next?’  Did we all need to “believe in miracles”?  For after all, not everything goes right first time – or even at the fourth time of asking when it comes to vehicle + trailer.

However, unlike the hapless Russian tank-troop, whose difficulties parking have gone viral, Earth Trust staff know what they are doing.  And we were soon in action ourselves:

First job done, we then formed a line, and moved more logs from under the cover of the trees to piles ready for collection later.  This was a fragrant, but sticky job – the beads of liquid on the logs shown below, are resin:

It was also a hard job, even with occasional use of timber tongs, moving some 5-6 tons of timber.  Refreshments definitely needed:

Timber extracted today was all firewood, for this was a first crop.  The trees had been planted close together, to encourage them to grow straight with minimum side-branching; and now had been thinned.  The remaining trees will yield a second crop in years to come – of timber for construction.  Which somehow I doubt will be manhandled by Green-Gymmers: that will be a job for contractors, using slightly larger timber tongs.