Log-arithmic work

By the session leader:

Here’s a squiggly tree.

Today’s task was two-fold.  First, planting a range of small trees: hawthorn, hazel, a viburnham (I forget which sort), rose, and I’m sure a couple of others.  These are to provide an understory, to support a range of small wildlife in an area where there are only large trees, like the one above.

In this picture of our briefing, you can see the funky spades we used: Schlich tree-planting spades.  They are named after Wilhelm Philipp Daniel Schlich, the eminent German-born forester, aka Sir William Shlich of the 19th-century Imperial Forestry Service. 

 

Step 1: dig a slot, and lever the ground up on either side, to make plenty of space at the bottom.

Then plant your tree, heel it in firmly, add a stake, and wrap the protector round it, making sure the bottom is well covered away from the gnawing teeth of small mammals:

Hey presto, before tea-break, the new understory with 70 new treelets ready to grow:

The forest floor was, as one volunteer put it, “like walking on moss.”  I wonder if this fungus is edible – there was loads of it on a dead silver birch:

After tea, our second task was to move last week’s logs up towards the track so the site warden could collect them later in the truck.  The human train got a good “logorhythm” going, which decimated the work:

That’s the power of logarithms

Various lavatorial jokes kept the enthusiasm up until we ended with a tremendous log pile – only about a week’s fuel for the Earth Trust’s boiler. 

The warden has to load the boiler with logs every morning and evening, to keep the water temperature up to a toasty 70 degrees.

Apparently, this is old technology now.  The pipework is certainly impressive: