Today the arboriculturalists came to coppice a few of the alder trees. They have made a very neat job of it, and stacked the fallen timber in piles. We'll have that out soon and saw it into bits small enough to go on the fire, and it can season over the summer. Unless you have a felling licence you can't cut more than five cubic metres per quarter. The rules are slightly different for coppice, which left the arboriculturalist and the wildlife trust officer scratching their heads on their previous visit over how you treat grown-out coppice. Two men came to do the work, and as I listened to the sound of two chain saws working simultaneously I thought it had odd musical possibilities. It's a dangerous career, tree work, especially climbing.
Yesterday I planted some hazel behind the hawthorn in the spinney, cursing slightly that I'd bought them bare root and was now commited to planting them when the wind was biting and I had a cold. I could have heeled them into the veg patch, but then they would sit there reproaching me, and it's getting late to plant bare root anyway so they really had to go into their final positions. They were bushy plants and I fixed a length of galvanised netting round each one. The previous hawthorn planting was still intact in its spiral guards, not yet eaten or dug up by rabbits. I found a couple of fresh shot gun cartridges in the spinney, which I removed. We give the local farm shoot effective carte blanche over the spinney and the wood, which is only fair when our land is acting as a rabbit reservoir for their field. They are under strict instructions not to shoot us, or the cats.
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