Next years wood

No more gardening got done yesterday or today. Matt and Julia were out coppicing and asked me to help pull out the wood I'll be burning next year so I tagged along to give a hand.

I only managed to keep it up for a few hours before I couldn't do any more Matt and Julia are still out there. We managed to fill up Matt's truck though.

The wood will get seasoned for a year at least before we burn it. It's piled up in pieces left as large as possible but still be handleable by one person. Those pieces will be chopped to the correct size for whatever burner they end up in just before use. A lot of the land around here has been coppiced for hundreds of years so we're lucky to have a free and sustainable source of heating fuel. (Well not free, takes a lot of effort to extract and prepare it)

As you can see in the photo the tits found my feeder yesterday. I bought a bunch of fat balls from the pet shop but I'll have a go at making my own next year. Means I have to clean my window so I can get better pictures of the birds. The one I put up today looked so washed out I had to doctor it a bit in Gimp before using it.

The weather is drizzly and occasionally rainy but the temperatures are up around 6C As soon as I can afford it I intend to buy several Min/Max thermometers. I need to track the temperatures in the bender, outside, in the polytunnel and in all the hotbeds. As this blog is meant as a record of the gardens I'll be recording those here once we get going. I'm hoping to be able to get started on making the new beds in the next few days.