Tree Bog Update

Although slow, the tree bog is progressing!  Here are the latest pictures:

The roof went on today.  I chose to use transparent corrugated plastic sheeting, to provide a smooth, clean surface for collecting rainwater (for handwashing), and for a light, airy feel.

I also built the door frame and started the feather edge board cladding.  This will go up to a metre above the floor, with reed screening above this.

The picture above shows the "hole".  A wooden box will be built above this in a rather nice varnished mahogany finish (salvaged from the bath panel in our still-being-refurbished bathroom!  A standard pine loo seat (also salvaged from the bathroom) will complete the "business end".

The rectangle in the picture is salvaged from the packaging a piece of equipment came in.  It's made of plywood.  I thought I'd use this to make a window that can be obscured with a small roller blind.  In this way the bog could double as a photographic hide.  (Don't knock it till you've tried it!)

Here's the view up through the roof.  Inspiring, no?  Less of a bog, more a cathedral to celebrate the human digestive system!

Fungi!!

Looks like we're having an early start to the mushroom season.  Picked up some Amethyst Deceivers last week, which we added to a wild mushroom sauce to go on some pork steaks.

And today I found a whole load of Peppery Boletes:

These are currently residing in the fridge with a warning label on.  They are hot and decidedly peppery to taste!  (Nice though)

SCF Diversification Course

I attended a Scottish Crofting Federation course on Diversification over the last two days.  Great course, with some immediate application for the woodland (and some of the other micro-businesses we are getting off the ground).

Although our woodland is not a registered croft, we decided to join the SCF a few months ago, for a couple of reasons:

1.  We subscribe to the crofting ethos of small-scale, local, sustainable production and land management.

2.  The SCF offers some fantastic resources, including their training, and membership provides some useful benefits (for example, one year's membership of WWOOFing - the website promoting and connecting volunteers with work opportunities).

Some of the subjects on offer over the two days included:
- Marketing and distributing food products locally (useful for us with the eggs, and also thinking ahead to mushroom harvesting and cultivation)
- Use of social media to promote products and services
- Earning additional income from internet-based businesses on the croft
- Tapping into the tourism market
 ..and many others.

The course participants included a wide range of people with different levels of experience and backgrounds, resulting in some good debate.

Tree Bog

One thing our woodland lacks is any sort of..ahem.."facilities".  As we put the Management Plan into action, we are hoping to attract some volunteers to help, and also to offer a limited amount of paid-for camping for those interested in what we are doing.  So, toilet facilities of some kind are pretty much essential.

Problems: No running water, no mains drainage, difficult to access for emptying of, say, a septic tank.

Solution: Some kind of waterless composting toilet arrangement.


Composting toilets work on the principle of aerobic digestion.  A conventional toilet seat sits on top of a box into which the - er.. "business" is deposited, followed by a handful of sawdust.  Provided there is airflow, and you keep the urine out, nature does its work and composts the stuff down in an odour-free fashion.  All that's needed is to shovel out what is now compost after a few months and make productive use of it.

The challenge is dealing with the urine.  If it gets into the pile odours will form apparently, as the process goes "anaerobic".  Many composting toilets deal with this with a urine-separator, that diverts the urine away down a pipe and into a soak-away.  Or, users are simply instructed to wee elsewhere.  OK for the gents, not great for the ladies.

A tree bog works like a composting toilet, but is situated in an area with growing trees, and is elevated above the ground.  The "business" simply falls to the ground where it breaks down and the nutrients are absorbed by the trees.  Similar principles apply as with regular composting toilets.  It's important to add some extra carbon, in the form of sawdust or similar, and urine contamination should be kept to a minimum.

As we are surrounded by trees, I decided to build a tree bog a little way away from the area we have earmarked for camping.  The aim is that, with only occasional use, the system will be able to break down the input at a suitable rate that it won't build up to excess and become a smelly problem.


Our woodland is an artificial plantation with the trees planted at 2 metre spacings, so four of them made a natural support for the toilet.

The picture above shows the "foundations" going in.  Two bearers of 4" x 4" larch, secured by 2 x substantial coach screws into each tree.  There will be 3" x 2" joists on top, supporting 6" x 1" floor boards.  The loo hole will be in the front left.

General view is that tree bogs should be at least a metre above the ground.  The ground in the picture slopes gently from back right to front left, giving us the metre we need above the loo hole.  Steps will be placed on the right, from where the ground is highest.

Next steps will be to construct the roof and walls above the floor.  The roof will be sloping, covered with corrugated plastic to catch rainwater.  This will be held in a water butt to provide hand washing facilities in the toilet.  We've also salvaged a wash hand basin from the bathroom refit we're having done at home.

The area below the floor will be screened with bamboo screening for aesthetic reasons and to keep out some of the larger wildlife.

We're just waiting on the materials for the next stage, and I'll post updates on here as the project progresses.  I'm hosting a photo shoot and barbecue with our local camera club in August, so it will need to be finished by then!

Chickens In The Woodland

We needed a way of preparing areas of cleared ground ready for tree planting in the winter.  As I'm trying to minimise use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides, putting some kind of livestock into the area seemed like a possible solution.

I know some people use pigs for this.  I have seen the result (I've heard it described as the "nuclear option"!)  The pigs do a great job of turning the ground and rooting out all the competing vegetation.  However, they can be a challenge to contain, and then there is the whole rigmarole of tagging, registration, moving the, etc.  So, we decided to go for chickens instead.

Our typical domestic chickens are descended from jungle fowl, and are a type of raptor.  Woodland is their natural habitat.

The idea was to create a temporary enclosure around the area we wanted prepared, put the chickens in, let them forage about, doing what chickens do, and then move them on somewhere else.

The challenges:

1. Having a shelter / coop big enough for the chickens but small enough to be readily moved
2. Having an enclosure sufficiently proofed against foxes and pine martens, but easy enough to dismantle and move
3. Avoiding having to go down morning and evening every day to let them out and put them to bed!  (Woodland is 7 miles from house).

The unknowns:

1. How effective would the chickens be at clearing the ground?
2. How long would they take to clear a given area before needing to be moved?
3. How much supplementary feed would they need in addition to what they were getting from the ground?
4. What about eggs?  How many would we have and what to do with them?

The Solution:

Some folks tackle this issue with a portable "chicken tractor" - a portable integrated run and coop that can be moved every day or so, like this:

This seemed OK, but I wanted to give ours more freedom of movement, and move them less frequently.

We finally decided to go for specialist electric poultry netting, as supplied by Agrisellex.  This came in a 50 metre length and we also ordered a gate.  It came with an energiser and support posts.  We bought a small ready-made coop, easy enough to be lifted by 2 people, and with a capacity for 12 hens.  We worked out it was cheaper to do this than buy the materials!

The hens were supplied by a local producer who seems to be the "go to guy" among all the local crofters for laying hens.  They are a basic hybrid and we got them at about 18 weeks old - just before they started to lay ("point of lay").

One of our Hi-line Browns

We started with 10.  The first place we put them was in an area I had earmarked as a tree nursery, for bring on saplings before planting out in their final locations.  Here is the set up:

Some of our "girls" with the coop in the background.  You can see the electric netting in the background.

Here is the energiser for the fence.  It runs off a 75Ah leisure battery, which lasts about a month.

Following advice on the Agrisellex website, I baited the fence with beef dripping.  The idea is to attract the predators to the fence so they sample it and are deterred from touching it again.  Apparently they have no concept of how far the electric field extends, so they don't try to climb it or burrow under it.  So far, 2 months in, we haven't had a problem, although the farmer has been losing lambs to foxes in the neighbouring field.

The final piece of "tech" was an automatic door opener, made by Chickenguard.  This little device runs on AA batteries and opens the door at sunrise and closes it at sunset.

Outcome

Well, the hens started laying after 3-4 weeks, right on cue.  We are getting 8-10 eggs a day at the moment.  We have been exchanging some for bedding with a farmer friend, giving some to friends, selling some at the door and, of course, eating them ourselves.  We sell everything we put on the doorstep.

After 5 weeks we decided to move the hens, as they had cleared the ground to the point in the following picture:

Most of the grass and vegetation had gone and the soil was finely "tilled".  There was chicken s**t everywhere.  Also, just out of picture to the left, was a nice pile of straw, wood shavings and chicken s**t,  resulting from five weeks of cleaning out the coop.  I've been turning this over once a week and it is composting down.

The next stage will be to turn the soil here over in rows and add the chicken compost, before covering with a mulch mat ready to receive seedlings in the autumn.

The girls are now in their new home in another part of the wood, starting the whole process again.  It seems like, with our ten hens and the area that our netting is capable of enclosing, it takes 4-5 weeks for them to clear it down.

I've been feeding them on proprietary Layers' Pellets for a balanced diet, which they tuck into voraciously!  Basically I feed them a restricted amount when we've put them into a new area, gradually increasing it as they deplete the natural food supply.  They take 80-100 grammes a day each on average, and are laying well and looking healthy on this.

Problems and Setbacks

We had trouble getting a suitable door-opener to work on our coop at first.  This meant a couple of weeks of travelling to and from twice a day to tend to them.  Our neighbour joked that we would have the world's most expensive eggs - paid for in diesel!

A couple of them are "flyers" and will escape from the enclosure.  I wasn't too worried about this, but yesterday we lost one to a predator.  I found it dead outside the fence.  Truth be told, I suspect it may have been our own dog what done it!

They do need maintenance, and I find I'm going to the woodland most days now.  This has a cost implication, but I make sure I do something else productive down there as well as tending to the hens.  In a way, it's a good thing.  We have a feeder and drinking dispensers that allow us to leave them a few days if necessary.

Apart from the above, it has worked out better than I could have ever expected.  I reckon we need to sell two boxes of eggs a week to break even on feed costs, and currently we're selling around seven, so they won't "die in debt" as has been pointed out to me.  This is in addition to the money saved by not buying eggs ourselves (we are quite prolific egg-eaters).

There is also a certain satisfaction (and sense of security) to know that you have a source of home-produced protein which could be a godsend in an emergency.

Next Steps

I'm planning to double the size of the flock, mainly to take advantage of the healthy local market for the eggs.  This will involve investing in a second coop (I'll probably make it this time) and an extra length of netting to increase the size of the enclosure.

Thanks to the following for their inspiration:

Geoff Lawton, the permaculture guy, at www.geofflawton.com

Bernard Planterose at Lechmelm Wood in Ullapool, where I first saw electric poultry netting being used.

At Last - The Management Plan!

Well, after a lot of thought, head-scratching and seeking of inspiration, I finally have a picture of where I want to go with our woodland.

You can see the 10-15 year plan here:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6derw8kMl12X1NSLVRxOEpXVTg/edit?usp=sharing

Any comments very welcome, as this is very much "learn as you go"!

Autumn Update

Well, here we are in October.  Not much logging over the past couple of months, but plenty going on in the woods.  Here's an overview of what we've been up to, and how the management plan is coming along.

Activity - Learning

I've been working my way through Ben Law's book; "Sustainable Woodland Management".  In it he has some case studies of woodlands that have been, or are being, regenerated.  One of these, Leckmelm Wood in Ullapool, is not far from us, so I went to visit.  Bernard Planterose, the owner, was very welcoming and showed me his plans and ideas.  Bernard runs a very successful timber building design and construction business from his wood, which he bought derelict from the Forestry Commission around 30 years ago.

In August we had a professional forager come and spend the weekend with us.  His speciality is fungi. It was staggering how much there was to learn just by walking around the woodland with him for a couple of hours.  I discovered that we had a lot of edible, and very desirable, species in the wood, including Ceps, Larch Boletes and Saffron Milkcaps.  We brought home quite a harvest and spent a happy evening over a bottle of wine, cooking up and sampling the various mushrooms.

During the summer we headed down to the open weekend at Trees For Life's estate in Glen Morriston.  Trees For Life is the organisation that is attempting to re-establish the Caledonian Pine Forest in Glen Affric.  We had an interesting morning wandering around their tree nursery and understanding how they prepare their saplings for planting out in the arduous upland conditions.

Activity - Woodland Work

Most of our time has been taken on woodland ride clearance and maintenance.  The rides are around 8 feet wide and cut through the plantation every 25 yards or so.  They were well constructed, with plenty of stone being put down, but many of them have become overgrown n the last few years.  Maintenance involves keeping the side branches of the ride-side trees brashed up to a height of about 8 feet, periodic mowing through the summer and remedial ground work to put right the damage caused by Landrover usage.  The net effect is to provide corridors which assist airflow and provide hunting grounds for bats and owls.

Other maintenance has included some routine fence repairs, and I'm hoping to get some guttering up on the cabin before the winter.  This will allow rainwater harvesting as well as preventing water from flowing under the cabin on the concrete apron, and soaking through the joists.

Also over the summer we have:

- Marked out and cleared a sunny area for a tree nursery

- Identified and cleared a site for our first speculative "Glamping" site

- continued with thinning work and some firewood processing.

With regard to planning, I spent a happy afternoon walking the woodland earlier in the summer, identifying natural glades that can be opened up as sites for edge-Planting of additional species (mostly broadleaves for coppicing).

We're now moving into the busy time for the foliage business.  The contractors will be arriving in early November to start cutting and bundling the Noble Fir foliage, and we've already attended the industry's first big trade show in Cheshire.