Coppicing mature hazel

There are many hazel trees down by the brook at Wild Acres, so it was a good opportunity to work on one to harvest some product and keep them from growing even larger.

I worked with Nick and we selected a suitable candidate. Some were very large and close to the brook, which made it hard to cut with hand tools.

We found a reasonably large one with enough straight stems that decent product could be harvested.

It took the whole morning to work on it between us. There were large protruding branches that needed to be removed first before getting to the central part. We found that there were several new young stems growing upright from the centre, so we tried to keep them as a head start for the next few years. And now that a lot of weight has been taken out, we can cut the mature stems as close as possible to the ground to get a well rounded stool.

Cherie cooked a fabulous pasta lunch, with plenty left over for seconds and thirds. Just what you need after a morning’s work in grey chill. As a bonus, there were pakora which were about as more-ish as it gets.

In the afternoon, I held the Tuesday Scratch club for Dursley Code Club. A full house again, although I struggled to get some children not to play games for the whole session. I’ll need to concoct some new tasks to motivate them to make their own code projects next week.