OUT AND ABOUT WITH RALPH: Owning a wood is hard work - but worth it
When we bought a forest of standing trees, we knew they would not remain standing for long.
Scottish Forestry was selling it cheap as it needed felling and the cost of doing so was far more than the timber was worth.
After 20 years and many storms, most of the trees were a tangled mass of windblow.
I’d cleared some areas myself, used the firewood to heat our house with a big boiler stove, and replanted with mostly sycamores and alders which would grow, if slowly, in our Caithness climate.
To clear the bulk of the tangle required big machinery, fortunately it was just about profitable for somebody to process the timber into woodchip for biomass heating. However it turned out that, even to clear a forest of windblown trees, you needed a felling licence.
A condition of the licence is that you have to regrow the forest and also plant a good proportion of hardwoods.
I sent in my application with an aerial photo of the forest showing the extent of the windblow, which probably convinced them to accept it.
The spruce and pine, I argued, would regenerate naturally. But I also had to plant some 1200 deciduous trees. Nursery grown trees, I have found, usually fail. They are not the right strain and a high proportion struggle and die.
You need trees from local seed, and also the right kind of tree in the right place.
So, with permission, I retrieved hundreds of little sycamores from local woods where they came up like weeds.
Alders purchased from a local garden centre also usually succeeded, and a friend who likes growing tree seedlings from local seeds gave me hundreds of mostly birches, rowans and wild cherries.
Birch is a bit iffy but will produce small trees here if given a bit of shelter.
A few horse chestnut and crab apple went in for the fun of it, recently I’ve kindly been given permission to take a few local aspen. This must be the toughest tree out, it even grows as bushes on the clifftops of Dunnet Head and is probably the most northerly native tree on the mainland.
It takes 15-20 minutes to plant a tree with its stake and tube which are essential to give protection from deer which browse seedlings and rub the bark off with their antlers.
Usually the tree is planted in extremely rough ground, then it has to be looked after, fertilising, watering, weeding and restaking if need be.This is often where big schemes fail in the north, the trees are bought and planted in bulk, they are left to fend for themselves and most or all die.
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The wood is managed principally for nature and wildlife, there are several ponds, lots of wild flowers, bird-boxes and an increasing diversity of birds, animals and plants.
I’m also very grateful to others with chainsaw training who have helped clear windblown areas I’d never have had the time to tackle.
But it is time for celebration. After three years has come the end of an era, I have passed my tally of 1200 trees!
Any more planted will be a bonus. Will they grow? Some will, at any rate. But a lot of young spruce, gorse and invasive salmonberry will need constant removal or they will be swamped.
And another era has ended. For nearly 25 years I have been cutting trees, stacking logs, collecting and trailering them home, splitting logs, stacking again and using them for a very green heating stem which burnt through at least 10 tons of wood each year.
It was quite sad, the last night we ran our big boiler stove, but now we have downsized to a small room-heater log-burner which boosts a more conventional heating system. It is, admittedly, a lot easier just to push a button as we get older…
The remaining spruce and pine continue to fall in every gale. Clearing them from paths and routes is an endless job but hopefully there will be more time now I don’t need to gather as much wood.
But the real bonus of owning a wood comes at this time of year.
We can actually trek into the wood on a bright morning of snow and frost, and choose our tree. I cut it down just before putting it up, a nice big tree which would cost a fortune to buy, and because it’s fresh it will last three weeks before the needles start to drop.
Looking after a wood is a lot of hard work, but it’s all worthwhile when you look at your own Christmas tree and have a lovely fire of your own logs!