Keeping busy

December 2018 - January 2019

No matter that Louise The Grand Dauphine found the sight of a ha-ha amusing, clearing out a year’s accumulation of wet leaves really isn’t a great deal of fun. Mind you, the landed gentry probably didn’t have to do it themselves. For us it could have been worse. So many times in past years we have stood gradually sinking into mulch and mud, shovelling out soggy leaves into dump bags; their weight requiring three grown people to heave them onto the back of a truck. But it had been freezing overnight and still minus three while we worked. The leaves were frosted crisp and white, and – because it had scarcely rained in weeks – dry. With a full set of rangers and a good turnout of Wednesday volunteers, the job was done in record time. But, at Gibside, there’s always something else to do.

Frost balls

Snow shovels are really useful for clearing the leaves

Leaf piles ready for bagging

Almost finished

We were back to brash clearing in the West Wood. Piling up row upon row of branches, twigs, rotted leaves and some quite substantial logs – the leftovers of clear felling – untangled by hand from a woven mass often two feet or more deep. We have found a few creatures here as we’ve worked but, up until recently, it has been a bleak and barren landscape unappealing to man or mouse. Now that we’ve cleared much of the ground, we’ve planted trees – hundreds of them, nearly all hazel. Bit by bit the landscape is morphing into fields of stakes and tubes. It shouldn’t take long though for the hazel saplings to emerge from their protective plastic, and for the unsightly dead hedges we’ve created to rot down and become overgrown.  Indeed, other plants are already recolonising this temporary desert – holly, chickweed, foxgloves, and birch of course.

Frozen foxgloves

Training session in progress

Planting hazels

A completed section of hazel planting

A welcome cuppa

We’ve left gaps in the dead hedges to create route ways so as not to make life too difficult for the larger mammals that live around here – badger, brown hare, roe deer. And the hedges should quite nicely accommodate smaller mammals, and toads and assorted creepy-crawlies.

The Forestry Commission crop removed from this site was nearly all western hemlock. They took the timber, but the cones and seeds that they left behind will only too soon become seedlings, which will have to come out. That should keep us busy.

Cup lichen ( Cladonia fibriata)

Moss - Polytrichum sp.

Lunch for two

Steve Wootten & Phil Coyne