Coppicing session 2

Oxleas Wood, 6 December

17 of our volunteers met up on this unseasonably warm Saturday, hoping to dodge the forecast rain.

We met up at our coppicing area and spent the first few minutes retrieving our stakes from last session from a bivouac that someone had set up a little way away. It was nice to see that the other heaps were not disturbed, and that Thames21 and a couple of other conservation groups had been able to pick up the material that had been set aside for them.

Once everyone arrived we broke up into pairs. We carried on working our way through the hazel in the area. By part way through the session, we were starting to see continuous areas of cleared coppice, and the area was obviously more open. That's really important to

get the full ecological effects of coppicing - just taking a tree here and there won't do the job.

Working on the hazel

And done!

Some of our volunteers spent our tea break trying (and failing) to identify some of the new fungi that have popped up since our last visit. After break, we spent some time putting points on a batch of stakes - we moved those up to the yard to be picked up and used in Jack Wood later in the season.

Our current stake collection

Some of the team made a start on one of the sweet chestnuts. We've more to do on that and on a couple of other hazels, but we managed to leave everything in a good position, and to do the bulk of the material processing. We've left another collection of material for Thames21, topped up the stake supply across the volunteering sessions, and passed on 2 barrow loads of stake material to Woodlands Farm (who are running hedging sessions this winter - see here for info).

We'll be back in the coupe in January - and hopefully our materials will still be there when that happens.