Category: Smallholding & Woodland

Ever since I visited Ben Law and spent a week learning in some detail how he built his amazing house from trees in his woodland I have dreamt of doing something similar. So much so that when it became available we scraped up the money and bought a 4 acre plantation of slow-grown, straight and…

Here’s a quick post to show the progress of the 1/2ish acre that I coppiced in early 2012. Right after the event 9 months later This weekend I know Sept 2012 to now doesn’t look much different, but it’s worth bearing in mind that it’s been a slow year for *any* growth this year due…

After our grand tour these past five years, 2013 is family Beale’s year of settling, observing and preparing.  We do have a long list of jobs but we can’t get them all done at once and we know that we need to plan ahead and prioritise rather than get stressed out about a mountain of work. I’ve…

We’ve been a tad busy at the Beale household recently. Mainly with the housebuild/planning permission episode (another story), deciding to buy a house instead, moving to that house (including the hilarity that ensues when moving from a smallholding with sheep, chickens and barn full of wood/tools/straw into an – admittedly relatively spacious – urban setting) and work taking…

It has been just over a year since we purchased with our pension – if you’re interested more details below – around 26 acres of marginal pasture (leaning towards wetland) and woodland in Wrexham, North Wales very near the borders with both Cheshire and Shropshire. For the first 6 months we didn’t do much there. We made…

We got the woodland shelter finished over the christmas break and tidied up the clearing a bit. It’s now ready for us adding some simple storage space (so we can store teabags etc there) and the final major project is to add a compost loo which I’ll start in Feb.

After a lengthy period of consideration I finally went ahead and invested in an Alaskan chainsaw mill to use to add value (or in Permaculture parlance, obtain the maximum yield) to the small amount of timber we’ll be getting when trying to bring our derelict coppice back to life; bringing in more light and hopefully…

Our new-to-us woodland has a large number of standing dead trees or ones with bits dangerously hanging off. Whilst I need to wait until autumn proper to kick off the program of works that is rapidly forming in my head, I am slowly racheting my time up at the woods which is no hardship. Today…

Our woodland is in need of some TLC, as things currently stand we can’t get to all parts of it because it is so overgrown. We’ve no management plan yet so we want to minimise any changes but we identified one blockage between the two main clearings that if removed would mean we could at…

We’ve moved (again) and I was very glad to have the big Ifor Williams to shift the garden/workshop and firewood. I was pushing it a bit with this load, though.

The aim being to build my first round wood timber framed structure, a compost loo in the garden

Now we’ve lived through a pretty cold winter I’ve a much better idea of the amount of wood that we need to keep us warm. Hot water is dealt with separately by a woodchip boiler that also drives radiators (which we don’t use). This winter we got though about 7 trailers of wood including the…