No excuse for not getting out in the Caithness air!
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OUT AND ABOUT WITH RALPH: Making the most of every day as trees need to be cleared and new ones planted
There can be a temptation, especially in older folk with no busy routine, to slow up at this time of year, to wait for better times and better weather, to put things off… Resist it!
We all have times when we just have to hunker down, maybe recovering from Covid or flu, or very ill or in hospital, or even in prison. There will be plenty of times in life when we have no option. But if you are actually fortunate enough to have some degree of health and some amount of free time, then make the most of it!
This is the first day of the rest of your life. Each day is very precious. Do something adventurous, something new, something positive, something creative.
I’ve done a little gentle kayak-surfing but never gone out with a surfboard. Maybe that will be the challenge for my eighth decade! But I love seeing keen surfers take on a bitterly cold, grey Thurso morning when it’s starting to sleet and create sheer joy pirouetting up and down huge unfriendly walls of water in clouds of blowing spray.
They certainly do not see this as season for dormancy. Look at the dogs racing up and down the beach, just enjoying the freedom of being out in the open and off the leash, they couldn’t care less if it’s raining or blowing a gale.
Too many of us have been indoctrinated from an early age that only sunshine is good whereas ALL weather is wonderful. As the psalmist says, this is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice and be glad in it!
This most certainly is the season for working in the wood, and there is more than enough to keep me occupied full-time – provided the wind isn’t gusting much above force seven, too many remaining trees are prone to toppling or snapping off. We’ve had a large area of windblow cleared and harvested, it now has to regenerate as well as be replanted with broadleaves, I need to put in about another thousand.
In Caithness you can’t plant trees quickly. Each tree needs to be protected from browsing deer by a plastic tube fastened to a solid stake. The right variety has to be carefully planted in the right place, then tended. After a few years the stake will likely rot and snap, or the ties will break, and the tree will then fall over and die.
A tree rescued is a tree planted, and on almost every walk round the wood there are one or two needing attention.
To plant trees you first need pointed stakes, you can sometimes expensively buy them but I prefer to cut my own from dead or fallen trees using the chainsaw. Stakes, tree-tubes, trees, spade, sledge-hammer – all then have to be carried to the planting area.
Ground has to be cleared from brushwood, long grass or invasive salmonberry. Planting the little tree itself is easy. Then the stake needs hammering in and the tube has to be fastened. Later a little fertiliser is added and the tree will likely need to be watered if the early summer is dry.
The whole process averages out at about 15 minutes per tree. Multiply that by a thousand… but by taking time over it, most of my trees have so far survived.
There’s no end of other jobs to do in the wood. Firewood always needs cutting, to trailer home, to split and stack. Heating a house with a big log-burning stove has been entirely practical over 20 years, it takes a lot of work but is carbon neutral and there are no oil or gas bills.
Invasive salmonberry should be pulled up or maybe strimmed, older plants with thick woody stems need to be cut down to the ground or else sprayed. But the weed shoots up everywhere when dark spruce and pine is removed and just has to be lived with.
Each gale fells more trees, some over the path, some across the fence, others crushing new tree-tubes. Clearing a fallen tree can be quite tricky with trunks and branches stressed in peculiar and dangerous ways. It would be much easier to cut potentially troublesome trees before they fall, but I never quite get round to it – there’s too much else to do!
Everyone who works out of doors, or just enjoys being out, knows this is definitely not the time of year to slow down. We have the most wonderful environment all around us. Most people can at the very least go for a walk. Get out there if you are able and enjoy our Caithness winter!
