BRAMBLE BASHING

We made a good start cutting back brambles which had overgrown a path at the western end of the site. It was raining most of the time, but not too heavy and a fire always makes things seem better.

FIRST FONC SESSION

Our first session on Feb 5th was a great success in many respects. We found that potatoes will bake in a biscuit tin (without the biscuits). This is a much lighter bit of kit to carry around than a cast iron cooking pot. It was very pleasant with lots of sun and very little wind, but it helps the fire to keep going if there is some wind. The home made fire beater was not needed to put out a fire but was handy for fanning the flames. The prospect of raw potato for lunch was added incentive.

The new loppers are a delight to use and we used them for cutting saplings to size for burning. The ususal practise for dealing with these if they are too big to pull by hand is to cut them with loppers and treat with herbicide. There are troubles with this method. Firstly we are not trained to use the herbicide. Also even when it is applied by trained operators it does not always work, even if the weather conditions are ideal, which they are sometimes. When the herbicide doesn’t work we have new growth attached to a very strong root system.

Tree poppers are commercially available but at considerable expense. Our home made versions have been fabricated from various bits of scrap metal which happened to be on hand. The design of each depends on the material available, but they all work and make short work of birch seedlings. Ones which have regrown are more challenging but most come out with some gentle persuasion.

We also tried out a new piece of kit, the stump shifter, for removing bigger stumps or multiple stem regrowth. It consists of a triangle frame of metal posts and a wooden base. From the top a chain is led down and wrapped around the trunk of the offending tree. A multipart rope tackle attached to a strong point is used to haul the top of the frame, exerting great force on the chain and lifting the tree out. With 4 hauling on the rope, the upwards pull on the chain is equivalent to over 100 pensioners.

The metal posts were cut from the old signs that were replaced last summer. The wooden base is a fence post that rotted below the ground and had been replaced. What better way to deal with waste from the site than to use it for tools to manage the common.

HCV activity December 2018.

Here is a pic from last winter when volunteers from Hampshire Conservation volunteers made good progress removing invasive plants in the same patch of heather