Longside Farm and Fishpond Wood: 14-11-2017

This week the team was split. The main task was to continue cutting down rhododendrons in Fishpond Wood, but a small splinter group were working with Jasper Prachek, at Longside farm, Ramsgill, on a two day hedge laying course. Both tasks involved cutting through woody stems but one group had to go a little further than the other.

At Fishpond wood the job involved the usual lopping, sawing, dragging and burning......

It was a lovely day so coats were abandoned quite early on. 


Brash was soon being generated in large quantities.
Can you spot three faces peeping over the brash pile? 

Please note the fire was built by women 
and a brilliant one it was too. 
(Just a little help from Peter B. and his parcoal)  

Laura made sure that every last bit of rhodie was removed.

 The brash was thrown on the blaze and soon got rid of.

Ruth joined in the branch tossing fun with gusto.

A nice little spot for coffee and lunch 
(and Audrey's flapjack - thanks Audrey!)

The area was cleared by lunchtime.

After lunch the NCVs moved pondside to tackle 
some of the rhodie creepers that are sneakily 
trying to establish themselves around the fringes 
of the main rhodie block.

Footpath officer Peter. picked off a couple of folk at the start of the day to help with putting in marker posts and a bit of drainage up at Nought Moor before coming down to Fishpond Wood to put in a few more posts in the afternoon. 

When David and Will appeared with Peter in the afternoon they wore the marks of a few hours digging and were hungry for flapjack!

Up at Longside farm the trainees worked hard to hone their pleaching skills and managed, by the end of day one, to finish laying the next section of the hedge they started laying last winter. To see a 10 minute You Tube video of a hedge being laid and find out about the skills that Jasper was so ably sharing with us, click HERE. (The man in the video is called, amazingly, Digby Pleacher. Can you believe that!!)

The hedge to be laid.

After a bit of tuition from Jasper....

...everyone split into 4 teams of two and 
got busy separating out the trees.

Andy started pleaching under the watchful eye of Jasper.

Coffee and lunchtime were taken on the tarpaulin...

...which gave us a grandstand view 
of the rainbow during the morning.

 Coffee over and everyone was busy with axes or billhooks.

It was often a two man job to keep the 
stems pushed over whilst pleaching..

Jasper did a bit of trench cutting to make it all look tidy.

Dave wielded a giant size mallet to knock in the stakes for the rail.

Now this rail will need to come down a 
long way to meet the other one.

A final last minute pruning frenzy....

...and there you have it. 
All the stems laid to a height of 3' at the same angle.
(Ignore the pile of brash at the back - the top of the hedge came up to the rail.)

More of the same tomorrow!!

Additionally...

Over the last couple of weeks a small group of NCVs and Nidderdale Birdwatchers have been out on four separate days emptying and refurbishing the nest boxes in Upper Nidderdale. They also visited the Sand Martin Wall at Gouthwaite Reservoir  in order to check which of the 100 holes had been used and clean them out.

Tony re-numbers the box whilst Barry stands at the ready 

with a specially adapted spoon for scraping out the inside.

Then it's off up the hill to find the next box.

At the sand martin wall an endoscope 
was deployed to see inside the holes.

In goes the tube containing the camera.
29 holes were logged as being used to rear sand martin chicks.
(NB Barry is considering applying to Harrogate hospital to see if they will take him on as an experienced gastro-intestinal examiner.)