Coppicing session 3

23 people braved a damp and chilly Saturday morning to carry on work on our coupe in Oxleas wood.

Back to work after a long break

Over the long gap between session 2 and session 3, we'd managed to use most of our harvested material elsewhere in the woods. Some has gone to the leaky damns being made by Thames 21 along the Wogebourne; some has gone to the farm for hedge laying classes; some has been dragged over to Jackwood and turned into fences and some has been added to the dead hedge around the bluebell area in Oxleas.Of course, some of it has also gone into dens and had to be retrieved.

With the heaps very much shrunk, we could spread out a bit and get back to work.

We had 8 new people this session - some entirely new and some new to coppicing - so we started out with a lecture on the whats, whys and wherefores. Everyone was then paired up with someone with either more practice in the woods, more coppicing practice or both.

Grouping up to share coppicing skills

We got though a good chunk of work before break. After break, we spread out further to make room for one of our most experienced people to work on a tree that was tangled up with some standing deadwood. We didn't want anyone passing anywhere near that during the work - dead wood is much less predictable in how it falls than live wood.

Disentangling dead branches

We did have a visitor during the session - a cockapoodle decided to check for biscuits and to quality control our sandwich wrappers, and to incidentally terrorise us all by scooting through our drop zone. Fortunately he came by at a time when we could stop, so no harm done.