An Informative Afternoon- Glenlyon Kirk 17th July 2010 12.00-5.00

Remember the excitement of phase one of the Home Heating Assessments ( I'm only joking- how could you forget)?  Well, set your thrill receptors to max because there is more to come.

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 A glen resident waves goodbye following a survey in Phase One

Not only is Heat survey Phase 2 happening soon (please contact GWI if you live in the glen and would like your house surveyed), but now that most people have got their Phase 1 results, we are holding a woodfuel informative afternoon /open day type thing to answer any queries about the survey results, any questions about woodfuel heating in general and to provide up to date, glen focused information on the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI).
Woodfuel expert Bernd Pinamonti and RHI consultant Steve Luker will actually be here, in Glenlyon to discuss, one on one, your personal woodfuel heating requirements and options,  Potential payback times should RHI become policy, and, how much wood you might need a year- cost of, etc.This is an excellent opportunity to really learn about woodfuel heating options, from people working in the field.

People are looking forward to it already. One resident contemplates the upcoming event.

Sorry I just remembered how exciting this must be for you - the reader, I probably should have said sit down first. Now would you like some water? 
Feeling a bit calmer, I 'll carry on. In addition, people from The Big Shed project (Shedi's) and the Loch Tay  Food Chain will be giving a talk and discussing the really interesting and positive actions and opportunities that are happening "over the hill", and what benefits they could bring for people in the glen.

Bracing themselves for a long wait- The Informative Afternoon is not until the 17th of July.

Locally grown Small Round Wood (SRW) products will be on display and available for sale, plenty of long whippy poles are a certainty so if you are struggling for Teepee poles for runner beans or that sort of thing, you will be in luck. This SRW  comes from some further coppice experimentation (Coppice Experiment 2)

Coppice Experiment 2. This bit of woodland looks better now its been thinned.

We have lots of poles from the thinning, they make much better pea supports than imported bamboo does
All of the above topics really need a blog of their own; Bernd has done a great job on the heat surveys. His survey forms are really comprehensive breaking down easily into payback with and without RHI (on ave... respectively). Steve Lukers input on RHI has, right from the start given the project an added economic impetus and awareness of how this innovative initiative makes the payback times for conversion to woodfuel compared to staying on oil  "A No Brainer Mate" according to my Australian friend Jason.

Shepherds, Farmers, Mole trappers, Dykers and assorted forestry types are all welcome.

During the afternoon I will no doubt gibber on about forestry and wood fuel supply chains and some other things.  Oh yes, we will very probably have an extraction demo from an Iron Horse - possibly the most low impact, economical extraction device available and undoubtedly the bit of the day you will chat to your nippers about. Incidentally no Jason an Iron Horse is not what Ned Kelly rode about on.

 

 These Iron horses really are quite astonishing, as you will see if you follow this link
http://www.artcom-tradebridge.com/ironhorse.html   

After watching this link an appropriate thing to say may be..."Golly Gosh those Iron Horses really are a spiffing looking bit of kit, well done Swedish chaps. 
If this short film has left you suddenly realising what a gap there is in your life as concerns viewing small tracked vehicles in action, you may find this next link heartening. This one is also recommended watching for fans of ultra dramatic music and implausible emergency situations, something one will rarely see in mainstream films methinks.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VCdvIzMxpt8&NR=1&feature=fvwp

The way the music picks you up, exciting, exciting, rescue, rescue, and then changes for the interior cab shots is just thrilling... you will see what I mean (I hope).

By the way- Children are welcome at the Informative Afternoon, I think they will find it interesting too.

How would Sam Steele have dealt with BP?

Despite being unusually busy I have read and enjoyed numerous books lately (as always),  and sometimes while perusing  "The Silvicture  and Management of Coppice Woodlands"   or the rather excellent Woodland Way by Ben Law, I have paused and thought " Oh I must mention that in a blog". Sometimes I mention these interesting things to my partner and sometimes she answers.
Anyway I was feeling a bit stuck for a blog- so much is happening Springwise and everything else that I just could not find something to focus in on- as I say so much is happening at the moment- then from the pages of a book the woodfuel message leapt out, relevant to modern society and potentially accompanied by astonishing photos. I think we all know that they can be an important component for a good blog.

News on the radio this morning that the amount of oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico is potentially double the amount previously estimated was accompanied by BP's share price rising 7%, as investors hope the American President is going to stop shouting at BP.

Yesterday I was reading of how BP's emergency plan for containment of a leak in the gulf were so detailed  they not only included plans for cleaning Walruses, inhabitants of sub Artic regions rather than the Florida coastline, but also listed a Japanese home shopping website as one of its "Primary equipment providers .....for rapid deployment in spill response resources on a 24 hour, seven days a week basis". The author of the article I was reading suggested that perhaps the whole document had been cut and pasted from a plan for Alaska.
Anything else - Oh Yes  I remember - Number Crunching Private Eye No 1262-

£6 - Hourly payment by BP to volunteers clearing up after oil spill.
£1.500- Hourly pay of BP Boss Tony " Its not our accident" Hayward
£1,500,000- Hourly profits of BP in last quarter
I would like to say that all the above made me really angry about the way massive oil companies and large corporations in general behave as regards their environmental responsibilities, but I can no longer remember a time when I wasn't really angry about that, so no joy there then.

What has been quite interesting is seeing Barack Obama become annoyed at BP and enter to some degree uncharted territory, the thought of Dubya criticising BP and wishing to punish it is not one that comes easily.
I think I may have a suggestion for him......One of the books I was recently reading was about a really extraordinary period in the mid 1890's when an estimated 100,000 worldwide people gave up their jobs and lives to head for an extremely uncertain but potentially highly lucrative future in the Klondike.

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 These would be miners face a 33 mile over this pass and beyond to Dawson. The Mounties in a bid to avert starvation had a check point at the top and each person passing through had to have a ton of food and supplies with them. Carrying this up took a number of journeys or involved paying "packers".

Very few of them managed the (properly arduous) journey to the emerging town of Dawson in the Yukon in the short time frame when gold was still to be found, however that did not stop a lot of people from getting rich in some way or another during the glory years of Dawson and the Klondike. The whole thing is a real macrocosm of human society with all its attendant facets and I could go on for hours about it all, however I will allow myself to relate just one small nugget of woodfuel thought on the subject.   
That this huge influx of people into an area of barren, generally frozen wilderness did not just end in disaster or utter lawlessness was due very much to the fledgling Royal Canadian Mounted Police and in particular one man Sergeant Sam Steele who did indeed have a steely gaze when it came to came to controlling hordes of unruly (mostly American) miners.

  Sam Steele had negotiated with Sitting Bull before the Gold Rush took him to the Yukon.

Steele used two main punishments to keep law and order in Dawson,  one (a blue ticket) meant you were leaving town and the other meant you would be working on the government woodpile. This woodpile was incredible. It kept more than 50 prisoners busy morning to night, the police and Govt offices alone used enough wood to make a pile 2 miles long and 4 foot square, all of which had to be sawn into lengths by the prisoners who could be serving backbreaking 3 or 6 month sentences on the woodpile.
There is a story from the time of an American gambler who, on coming up before Steele was contemptuous when fined fifty dollars.
"Fifty dollars - is that all? I've got that in my vest pocket," he said.
Whereupon Sam Steele added "...and sixty days on the woodpile. Have you got that in your vest pocket?"

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An older Sam Steele- what a crazy hat! 

Now it occurs to me, in relation to punishing BP or wishing it and its ilk took more care with our environment that perhaps this approach would be better than fining them what will always be a small (oil) drop in the Ocean.
If corporate responsibility involved those responsible for these disasters personally and actively cleaning them up alongside all the people whose livelihoods have gone because of this slick, and alongside all those volunteers - there because they care, then perhaps some small glimmer of understanding and an actual feeling of responsibility and concern at the results of their negligence may eventually start to permeate these peoples lives. Who knows they may actually begin to care about the damage they do, rather than just the money they make- Either way it would worth finding out, just a month cleaning oil on the beach would probably do it for most of those BP fat cat's and they would always be truly welcome to work on my woodpile should they discover a previously unkown love for the outdoors. 

Good reading - Klondike - Pierre Berton,
Practical Forestry for the Agent and Surveyor- Cyril Hart 


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Getting the Hazels in

On Friday we planted the hazels. Our planting site at Loch Archie runs above a recently buried power cable and this certainly made for some interesting planting. The site is currently planted with (tubed) native broad-leafs (BL's) with the exception of the strip we were planting. Prior to the BL's being planted it had been a small commercial block of Sitka Spruce which was felled about 4 years ago. A number of rootplates from these spruce alongside woody debris from the harvesting operation had been incorporated into the soil of the strip we were planting. For those who have not had the experience of trying to plant trees in wood instead of soil, it basically involves a spade bouncing of buried wood and a new spot being found for the trees. It was only an infrequent problem, but it meant some bits were hard to plant and that some of our lines and spacings were a bit wonky.

Our planting site, looking to the West, then to the East.

We had a really enjoyable visit from some of the pupils and teachers at Glenlyon Primary School. The school is making great progress towards an Eco-Schools award and recently held a well attended and very pleasant  event aimed at creating vegetable growing areas in the schools grounds.The kids from the School are mostly well adapted to the glen weather which is just as well because not long after they started planting trees, we were blessed with some water to help them get established. I really think in this case the pictures mostly do the talking.

 
The intro bit- "This is a Hazel tree and we are planting them because......." Luckily no-one fell asleep.

Getting started with Screefs and T-notches for planting. Note various waterproofs hanging on the gate.

Headteachers and pupils get busy and the trees start going in.

Sometimes tree planting can be exciting.

Rain is good because it helps things to grow.

Mixed emotions as time to return to school comes.

Eventually we got all the trees in and Loch Archie now has a new hazel corridor along its north end.

All Done!
My thanks in particular to John and Jason who were so very helpful on the day and also to Victor Clements of Scottish Native Woods for organising the trees and to E-Forests for donating them.

 

Getting Medieval with the Hazel.

I'm quite excited about tomorrow's hazel planting. Establishing a new native species coppice woodland is not commonly done today.  People plant broadleaved woodlands for sure, but the criteria is often a generally assumed benefit to nature and while the planting of any tree is commendable, I have sometimes felt that opportunities for sustainable future timber production have been missed. In my first years working in the glen we did quite a lot of planting under the very popular native pinewoods scheme that the Forestry Commission ran.

 Meggernie pines

This scheme was aimed at enlarging the overall area of Caledonian Pinewood in Scotland and involved either the natural regeneration of relic fragments of these ancient woods or new planting in suitable areas. This new planting was what provided the employment and in short involved planting pines (grown from Meggernie seed) on the drier sandier knolls and mixed broadleaves elsewhere. We planted Rowan, Birch, Hazel, Ash, Cherry, Willow, Holly, Juniper and Alder amongst other things and I recall having an interesting chat with the forest manager about planting them out in same species groups closer together than the recommended 3 metre spacing with a view to future timber production. The conversation ended with a realisation that we were (in the strange way that you can) planting a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and that both this and a lack of any access to the plantations could hinder future timber production. 
Future timber production from these plantings simply did not appear to be on the agenda as indeed it still is not in the majority of  broadleaf planting perhaps the equation is Conifer = timber, broadleaf = nature, but I beg to disagree and with what we are doing tomorrow hope to put my money where my mouth is by planting with a purpose. That purpose being the provision of timber and small round wood on a continual cycle, a cycle that will link our actions with those of our Celtic ancestors and even their Neolithic forebears.

People since time immemorial have used wood - whatever they had to hand usually to make the things they needed, fire, boats, shelter, weapons, fire, a bit more fire. We know this because we have seen badly drawn pictures of these people using these things in museums and books.

Anglo Saxons using small round wood - note the wattle and daub wall, loom etc. Note also the strange absence of criss-cross sandals so common in these pictures -perhaps in the wash on the day this scene was painted?

Coppice would have been a common, pretty essential practice for these people, after all if it was good enough for the Romans.... One needs only to look at the tools of today's Coppicer to see a link with the past, indeed you would probably have to go quite far to find something as obviously medieval in origin and still in use today as the Billhook with its multiple regional forms. 

 
There is a thriving market in these good quality old tools as interest in coppice is rekindled. I recently bought myself a left bevelled billhook which I have been using in Coppice Experiment 2. I managed to get a properly fearsome (almost cutting the hairs on the back of your hand)edge on it and find it excellent for cleaning poles and cutting to size. It is also a pleasant tool to use, no engine noise or fumes disturb you in the woodland as you work away, in the footsteps of your ancestors.
Whether these people planted trees or just coppiced natural forest is uncertain. What is certain is that tomorrow we are planting with a purpose and you are welcome to join us.

Hazel Planting - 28th May - All welcome

In March we were successful in our application for 300 hazel trees to plant at Loch Archie as a future fuel supply. Those trees are now here and a date has been set for planting them, Friday the 28th of May. The full moon the evening before will hopefully make for an energetic start as we quite literally plant a form of energy. One that with proper management will long outlast many generation of us.

Coppicing is believed to be the oldest management activity undertaken by humanity, pre-dating agriculture and the more I read of it, it seems to be just about the most sustainable one we do as well so no surprise it's so out of fashion now. Perthshire has a long documented history of managed coppice, primarily oak,ash and hazel for industries that either no longer exist or that now use oil based chemicals. Plastic becoming widely available in the 1950's did for a lot of traditional pole producers and saw a big decline in people coppicing for a living.

We will get a variety of benefits from the hazel's and so will the associated flora and fauna, but this wood is primarily for burning to replace oil. It can be hard to realise how productive hazel can be in a coppice cycle, so I have here some photos of Hazel from an inspirational website- 
http://www.hazelwoodlandproducts.co.uk/coppice-management.htm

After 1 years growth.

2 Year Old Hazel Coppice

3 Year Old Hazel Coppice

5 Year Old Hazel Coppice, producing lots of hazel nuts.

10 Year Old Hazel Coppice

As you can see, this chap has some amount of potential firewood. If you look at the trees there and imagine 30 such trees, converted to logs and in your woodpile a smile will probably spread over your face. When you think on a little and realise that you will be (if you wish) cutting the same amount next year and the year after and the year after that and that this small planting at Loch Archie, a relatively small strip of land into which we will plant just 300 trees, could yield this indefinitely. If you cut a tenth (30) of the Loch Archie hazels every year, by the time you finished cutting your last "Coup", the first cutting would be ready to go again- ad infinitum as it were.
What a truly magical low impact fuelwood system. I have been told that coppice can outperform Sitka spruce in many ways and  this renewable aspect certainly makes it so to my mind. If you cut a tree for firewood, the tree is gone and you must plant and grow a new one before you can do get firewood again. With coppice, the firewood grows while your back is turned. You don't even have to say Abracadra it just does it- providing you can control your herbivores of course.

Before our hazel can begin the cycle in the pictures it will need to become established which takes a few years. As little as 3 on good lowland sites, perhaps a little longer on ours. Once in the coppice cycle however the hazel stools can live for an extremely long time and be consistently productive.
So why not join GWI and the smiling happy children and teachers of Glenlyon Primary School for a mornings treeplanting on the 28th and be part of this wonderful cycle. Bring a spade if you can.

My thanks to Hugh Ross at Rawhaw woods for letting me use his photos for this blog and well done to them for what they are doing and creating.
http://www.hazelwoodlandproducts.co.uk/coppice-management.htm

I hope to see you there.

A consideration of Skyline Extraction

The feasibility study has numerous tentacles concerning the supply of woodfuel. Being surrounded by timber does not necessarily mean that it will be a doddle getting it to people. A primary consideration for me at the start of the project was how to obtain enough timber to maintain a constant and hopefully growing supply of fuel for people changing from oil to wood as their primary heatsource. It was obviously important that this would be done in a sustainable fashion and there are various forest harvesting or production techniques that lend themselves to this.
But how to do it? The big how to here is called extraction by the way, and it has been challenging foresters for a long time. In the case of GWI it is all intrinsically linked to the type of boilers being used, (wood)chip or log boilers being the options available.The fuel for both of these can come from the same tree which is good, but how do you get the tree out of the woods? How much of it can you get out?What infrastructure needs to be in place for that to happen?, How much will it cost per ton and because we are short of space for drying; how dry could it be when it came out?
A further complication in Glenlyon is obviously terrain, in particular steep sided slopes. I am sure that some boffin somewhere will have worked out a table calculating economic loss in forestry plantations per degree of slope and I don't think its hard to see how that could be the case. Cost and conservation are the watchwords in this case.
For example: lots of forest harvesting and extraction these days is done very efficiently by machines such as harvesters and forwarders.

 A Forest Harvester can cut up to 60,000 tons of timber per year.
However these machines can only work on a certain degree of steepness, beyond that, more roading must be put in at more cost and that of course, can only happen following approval from various bodies, which creates a time delay, which costs more money. Remember all this timber you are harvesting has very probably not been thinned and due to elevation, exposure, and thin mountain soils is consequentially likely to be of low quality and thus low value.
I have been quoted between £350 and £500 per day for the hire of a forwarder and Operator in Glenlyon, so you can see from that how quickly costs could add up. Particularly because depending on the type of harvesting you are doing, you may not have the option of stopping an uneconomic operation without rendering the half felled site liable to potentially disastrous and even more uneconomically viable windblow.
Given that there is very likely to be a demand for chips, lets look at one option we considered earlier on in the project for supplying them from the steep slopes no one else wants. Whole tree extraction by Skyline.

A skyline or cable Crane is best thought of in terms of being like a cable car or gondola that people going skiing might use.

The same principles of cables going up and down a slope carrying a weight can be used to extract timber from slopes with a spar tree being used as a top anchor point for the cables. Around 1910 in the early days of forestry in British Columbia, a skyline system called "High lead" was developed which kept the logs off the ground, by suspending them in the air for their whole journey down the slope. Back then it saved power and was swift, today it makes Skylines a good option for reduced ground pressure from extraction. The high lead system involves a high spar tree for the cable to run to and from. The felling of these makes for some of the most incredible photos of Canadian logging.

Yes, the picture on the right really does show a man  (Big Bill Moraski) standing on top of a spar tree with his arms out. These pictures are from a time before Photoshop.

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You can the feller hanging on as the tree top is felled. This could apparently "set the spar tree lashing back and forth in a 20-foot arc". 
So was this our plan, to stand on top of big trees with our arms out, then axe blades whirling produce enough timber to meet the needs of the glen?
Err not quite, the plan was to buy a 2nd hand converted excavator cablecrane for a bargain price locally, use it to produce a large stockpile of fuelwood timber over a few months , process and start drying the timber, repeat as needed . The option was particularly tempting given that the machine could still perform large excavator duties, such as making forest roads or loading bays. It could also potentially be fitted with a log grapple or processor head making it a multi-purpose machine that would be useful not just to us, but could probably be hired to others in the glen for digger jobs.

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What a beauty eh'

A lovely cab for the operator, note the all important winches at the back and skyline boom extension at the front. 

There could have been great advantages for GWI from doing whole tree harvesting for chip production. An approximate third more produce comes from harvesting the foliage and you also leave a tidy forest floor for replanting or for safe future operations. Unfortunately someone else spotted what a bargain the machine was and unlike us could just buy it on the spot, whereas we would probably still be applying for grant funding for it as I write.
It was good though, having the experience of considering using such a machine, thinking it through and consulting with a very experienced skyline operator on it. He gave me lots of interesting thoughts and advice and said of the project " With all the timber here, how could you fail" which was really encouraging.
I am now looking at a totally different machine which is a little dearer, but new. I shall write of this at another time.
Note; The Canada photos come from the excellent book " The Lumberjacks" by Donald Mackay.

 

Forest Mensuration in Upper Mirkwood

Last week I carried out the first of GWI's Forest assessments. These assessments are intended to provide GWI with research based data concerning the suitability of a forest for inclusion in or use by the project.
A key component of the feasibility study concerns the provision of a reliable and sustainable supply of fuelwood for use in the glen. The wood currently standing in coniferous plantations up and down the glen could probably meet our needs for a very long time, if it were to be managed with firewood resource as a key management objective.
It is however one thing looking at a forest and saying; "There lots of timber in them woods, you mark my words"(a finger may be also pointed skywards at this point). It is another matter altogether to measure how much timber there may actually be.

 Lots of timber
This involves having knowledge of the mystic science of Forest Mensuration. Gaining such knowledge was perhaps the most boring bit of all the boring bits of forestry school. However once learnt and equipped (Clinometer, girth tape,distance measures, hard hat with visor etc) one can potentially survey, and then  estimate the volume of any given forest. There are various ways of doing this according to the age, value and previous management of the forest.
In the case of Upper Mirkwood with it being a single species (Sitka spruce), fairly homogeneous looking planting and me just looking for a rough idea of volume, I decided to put in 10 sample plots, randomly scattered through the woods. Each plot will have a radius of 5.64m (0.01ha)and within that radius all trees over 7cm will have their DBH (diameter at breast height) recorded and the top height of the tree with the largest DBH will also be recorded. Sounds fairly easy eh' - One question. Have you ever been in unthinned Sitka Spruce?. I would guess that most people have not and that the few who have, have either left soon going  "This stuffs horrible and spiky and jaggy and its really dark in here and oww I've just been jagged in the eye" or they have gone "Oh well, better get the mensuration done, oww, just been jagged in the eye- this Sitka must be the extra spiky kind etc"

The grim reality behind the green front line of a Sitka wood.
Each tree (in a sample plot) over 7cm mid diameter is measured with a girth tape "hug" that involves embracing the tree. Often the Sitka hugs you back, leaving affectionate little scratches on your hands and arms. In this wood the tress are not growing particularly fast and there are some areas where there has obviously been a problem with deer, as a result the canopy is just closing. In other areas the canopy has closed successfully and the competition for light has begun in earnest. Both for the trees who will fight for it all their lives and for me trying to read the girth tape in the dark.  

I really cannot understand why more people do not enjoy walking in these woods?

For the purposes of the project I am particularly seeking areas adjacent to roadside or on flattish accessible ground. This is mainly because it will  be a lot easier to extract timber from these areas. You have to start somewhere and a thinning going back from the roadside is a good place, not just for access reasons but also because the wind corridor that can be your forest road gains a more windfirm edge to protect the interior with. Mirkwood is an upland plantation and eventually I emerge, blinking in the light like a coalminer. 

Quite often in these plantations you will find the remains of old Sheilings or come across old roads or tracks. I have found little of that in here, but when I come out onto the top of the woods I find a few Sheilings, as always they are near to water.There are Stags on the open hill behind me and the weather looks a little changeable.

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Ben MC'kneehurty beckons, but I am working and must decline.

 Looking to the West.

Its downhill from here, with a few more plots along the way.