Polelathe - The New Forest Show & Dick Apps

It's New Years Eve and time to look forwards to the coming year as the nights grow shorter and the seasons prepare to start their cycle once again. I noticed that the birch buds are already starting to swell (although the recent cold spell should have held them in check) and the tops of the trees are starting to turn a characteristic faint purple.

At this time of year I start to look forward to the coming spring and the show season starting again.




One of the highlights of last season was attending the New Forest Show for my first time. For many years (and decades) the polelathing pitch at the show was more than filled by Dick Apps. With his pole lathe and caravan he became something of a legandary figure at the New Forest and other shows.

Despite the rain there was a good crowd (mainly for the band - an offshoot from the wurzels, known as the New Forest Plonkers - rather than for us, it has to be said).




This year the Hampshire Coppice Craftsman Group was present in force. With hurdle makers, broom and pimp (a kind of birch firelighter) makers as well as many as four pole-lathe turners on hand to fill the gap left by Dick. But it's hard to fill his shoes as I learned once the show started and I had to field constant questioning on his whereabouts and health.







We were delighted that Dick was able to join us on the Wednesday and we even managed to coax him into showing us how it should be done, when he had a go on my lathe for a while.


Dick was able to stay around long enough for me to get the benefit of his advice. It was a real pleasure and I look forward to attending the show in the coming year.

Lynchmere Common - A Boxing Day Walk

For a couple of hours on Boxing day we went for a quiet walk on the Lynchmere commons.

The weather was cold and clear. The icy Easterly wind only just starting to blow

The commons were used for military training during both world wars and many of the lumps and bumps relate to trenches and earthworks from these times. On this walk we wanted to inspect the trenches and start to untangle the military holes from those left by more ancient and more recent users of the commons.

Exploring quiet corners of the common we came upon some magnificent birchpolypor brackets.

The sun started to disappear very swiftly and the cold advanced

So we retreated from the trenches back to the log fires and a cup of tea.

Season's Greetings

Greenwood - A Winter Solstice Charcoal Burn

I found myself making charcoal last week. It's a bit strange but I do sell a small amount of charcoal around Christmas and the New Year. Perhaps its global warming?

This year I didn't have enough left over so I needed to make a few bags more. I make my charcoal in old 40 gallon oil drums using birch cleared from the commons as a part of the heathland management. So it's local and quite environmentally friendly in comparison to the vast quantities that are shipped into the UK each year (it also burns hotter, faster and is cleaner without being impregnated with chemicals) .

To make a few bags I only needed to burn a couple of bins but despite my best attempts to start earlier in the day I ended up doing the whole burn in the dark.

There was something quite satisfying about burning so close to the winter solstice. The tawny owl that lives in the woods came to keep me company.


In the dark I could not fill in the time with other jobs and unaccustomed to doing nothing during a burn I ended up trying to take photos of the bins.

I make charcoal in old 40 gallon oil drums. I choose to do this for a couple of reasons It doesn't require any investment (buying a purpose built kiln can be expensive) and I can make the charcoal at the end of my working day, the burn taking only a
couple of hours.




It is quite easy to do demonstrations for visitors and encourage others to do the same with waste wood. Unlike a big (8 foot) kiln which takes over a day to burn you can seal the oil drum after a couple of hours and then safely leave it to cool and come back the next morning to unload the bins.

While the bin is lit the aim is to burn off all of the moisture and volatile chemicals until you are left with pure carbon which is then sealed up to cook in an oxygen free environment using the retained heat of the fire.


If you don't seal the bin in time you will just be left with ash as the wood burns away entirely, and if you stop too early not all of the wood will be carbonised completely and large 'brown end' will be left.

During the latter stages of the burn as the vents on the bin are slowly shut down volatile chemicals can be trapped and if the lid is lifted without care they can literally explode out of the bin (don't try this at home!).



Being bored I kept looking to see how the burn was progressing and tried to capture this effect on camera whilst waiting for the burn to finish.

Several attempts to take a photo as I lifted the lid failed. Partly due to the ferocity of the flame and partly due to slightly singing my hand having taken my gloves off to work the camera. But you can see from the shape of the flame in this final photo taken after the initial explosion of flame from the bin that it's actually the volatile gases burning outside the bin.

Polelathe - Get a Handle on it

I hadn't planned to do much on the pole lathe today but it was a little too cold to wield a spanner easily and so a bit of greenwoodwork to keep warm was a bonus.

Turning to keep warm is an opportunity to do a few simple jobs that I otherwise don't get around to. The piece of birch my hand landed on said chisel handle to me, and I need a few big handles for bowl hooks. Given that I've just managed to break one hook I could do with putting the rest onto handles.

Just about any long round shape will do for a chisel handle as long as its comfortable to hold. There is a traditional shape for the handle which has a gentle curve with a waist about halfway up. Length is upto you and for bowlhooks it seems that handles well over a foot long are the norm. They provide the leverage needed to keep the hook steady on the wood.


Once the handle has been turned I drill a suitable hole in the end and then heat the chisel (held in a vise) with a propane torch until its almost red hot.

Then lower the handle firmly, it fills the hole and then burns its way further into the handle. Finished off with a few sharp taps on the chopping block while its still smoking slightly.

This handle has turned out to be attractive as the normally plain birch is two-tone coloured where the tree had rot in it.



Another bowl hook is ready to do battle, all I need is time to prepare the next blank. But for now I am warm enough to do some of the other jobs on the list today.

Lynchmere Common - Scraping the pond

Winter is our busiest season on the commons as we carry out much of the heavy management work whilst the animals and plantlife are dormant or absent for the winter.

During the week we have been scraping one of our ponds that had become silted up and choked up with weed.

A couple of years ago we scraped the adjacent pond and the improvement has been clear. A recent survey found rare plants such as bog pimpernel starting to return.



While I like to use hand tools digging the pond out by hand would have been a little too challenging. But luckily we know a 'man who can'.


Robin always has a few more toys in his box than I do (or so it seems). So he came in for 2 days to help us out and scrape the pond, part of the ditch feeding it and restore the nearby bridlepath with his excellent mini-digger under the expert guidance of Hilary our pond warden.



It might seem a brutal approach but I am told that the pond life will benefit come the spring.

Now if only we could teach all the dogs not to run through it (and people not to throw in things) then it would be a perfect new home for all things amphibious or aquatic.

Polelathe - Bowled Over

It's been an ambition of mine to start turning bowls. I've been planning to build a bowl turning lathe but space and time have been against me recently. So I decided to have a go on my normal lathe. Luckily Robin Wood had just posted on the bodgers forum how to make a simple mandrel (the cylinder with the cord wrapped around it) by turning the end to be a tight fit into a 1 1/4inch hole drilled into the bowl blank.





If you haven't already been there you can find Robin Wood's excellent blog here at http://greenwood-carving.blogspot.com/

Just making one bowl has shown me where a bowl lathe need to differ from a spindle lathe. For now I just 'bodged' the work rest. But I need a sturdier solution as any flex in the work rest magnifies the ability to dig into the wood. Likewise my goblet hook tools are a little thin for bowls and add to the flexing.

I found the outside of the bowl the hardest part to turn possibly because my tread is set for spindles and doesn't allow me to maximise power so the gouge is pulled into the wood rather than through it. I have a lot to learn, and need a lot more practice.

It's not very pretty but it's a bowl. I think I will call the finish 'dug'

Cutting Pea Sticks and Bean Poles

Cutting birch coppice is one of the things that needs to be done on the commons during the winter months. For besoms (traditional birch brooms) its important to cut and work up the brash before the buds form so the sooner the better to do the work.

Luckily Saturday was great weather and I was joined by some friends to the work. Although I provided loppers and bowsaws it was good to see that the billhooks were favoured. After a short introduction to the use of traditional billhooks and we got stuck into the birch.


A lot of the birch will be cut with modern power tools or machinery but its good to do some cutting with hand tools and to select the cut stems for traditional garden products.

I think it helps to understand how the landscape was formed and how it was originally managed. We've all been so indoctrinated into going to the garden centre. It can often be a bit of revelation how simple it is to get what you need from the woods and be looking after the environment at the same time.

Most of the birch was a little too young to be good for besoms, but it will make fine pea-sticks and bean poles. The short stems will be selected for pea-sticks, the larger straight stems for bean poles or broom handles.

Learning to look at the wood and see the shape of the stick, or handle, or pole that you want is a simple skill and well worth it. Acquire it and you'll never need to buy an overpriced composite walking stick again.

A traditional pea-stick is upto 6 ft in height with the bottom foot stripped of branches for pushing into the ground. A good shape will be something of a fan rather than a single straight stem. Good straight stems will be poles and broom handles, although you might shapes useful for a variety of purposes, such as coat hooks, walking sticks, clothes line props, fruit cages etc.

Any that doesn't get used for the garden will be bundled as faggots for kindling so little will be wasted.

I'm a bit of a fan and collector, not to say obsessive, on the subject of billhooks so it was great to see 5 of my old hooks being used with such enthusiasm. As well as the Brades, there was an old Morris (recently rehandled by me), a Brades single bevel 10inch, an Elwell 3901 and a Fussells Biped

Andy did so well with the hook that he worked up a bundle of bean-poles for his new allotment.

Cut a Christmas tree and care for the environment

This weekend I've been working on the commons with some friends and one of the highlights of the day was for everyone to cut their own Christmas tree.

Here the trees are self seeded Scots Pine from the nearby plantations. If we don't cut them back the heathland would eventually turn into a dark and gloomy pine forest (for a while at least, if it didn't turn into a birch scrub first).





There is nothing wrong with a dark and gloomy pine forest in the right place. Germany for example! But we already have a lot of pine plantations around here and they tend to be very low in bio-diversity. Whereas the very rare lowland heath provides a habitat for many rare and threatened plants, birds and insects.

So we cut Christmas trees and did our bit for the environment, and if by doing so we can reduce the number of imported trees then even better.


The Scots Pine makes a fine Christmas Tree. The branches are a little more open than on a Spruce or Fir tree but we prefer that for hanging our decorations. Another advantage is zero needle drop. That's right Nil.

Apparently Scots Pine used to be a popular tree until the marketing machine made us lust after a different shape tree.



But there is no need to buy an expensive imported Nordman Fir when you can have a fresh cut native tree instead (Scots Pine is the only conifer native to England).

I was so busy that I forgot to get one for us. I will be back during the week to cut one for us and a larger one for the parish church.



If you live in the Guildford - Farnham - Haslemere area and want to cut your christmas tree and do your bit for the environment then you can do so at Frensham Ponds on Dec 14th

Wood for Burning

The weather is dismal as usual. Cold and wet. But our wood burning stove brightens things up and it's better for watching than the TV. Almost as good as the bird table.

The price of fossil fuel is making log fires more popular and I can smell wood smoke up and down our lane these days. I've heard that there is a long waiting list for installation of wood burners by the local firms.

There must be an increase in demand for firewood locally, although I've not heard of any happy firewood merchants - but then that's probably a contradiction in terms. I have noticed more people asking me if I've any old wood lying around. It seems that we are still scavanging our firewood in the traditional way.

There are several versions around of an old poem about firewood. The one I've posted here was sent to me by my mum (her excellent calligraphy) some years ago and there's a lot of truth in it.

Just about any wood will burn, but they all have different characteristics. The age and moisture content has a huge effect upon the quality of the fire. Some wood needs to be seasoned for quite a while, sweet chestnut for example, before it makes good firewood. Other woods, like birch, don't last well and are best dried and burnt within a year.

The most popular firewoods around here are Ash, Oak, Beech and Birch. Though a few burn Pine. We burn a lot of birchwood, otherwise it would go to waste. It's very good firewood almost immediately and its excellent as long as its dried. Unlike many denser hardwoods it doesn't need to be seasoned. In fact if you do leave it outside for a season it will probably be past its prime already. As the poem says it will burn hot and fast, so we mix it with some oak and beech when we can.


It's best to burn firewood with the lowest possible moisture content as the combination of the volatiles in the wood and the steam will create creosote in your chimney given half a chance. We stack our firewood in shelters down the side of the house and try to bring it in at least a day and preferably two before we will burn it so that it can dry as much as possible.

Lynchmere Common - Hidden Midden

Now and then I do find old bottles on the commons. Perhaps discarded by woodsmen of years ago, but more likely the residue of youngsters playing in the woods in decades past.

There are a couple of places where I regularly find old bottles and jars from before the days of branding or screw tops. They are a lot heavier than today's glass bottles and jars. To prevent them becoming a danger to people or grazing animals I tend to pick them up and add them to the recycling, unless they are particularly old or interesting, when I might keep or reuse them.



Whilst removing an oak bough from the fenceline this week I found a number of interesting old bottles and jars. It's clear that these are part of old dumps for farm refuse, or middens, dating back to before regular collections were made.

How old they are I don't yet know. What's coming to light at the moment is mainly from the mid 20th century (I think).







One I particularly like is labelled 'genuine malt vinegar' and seems to have been a corked bottle. the rest are an assortment of preserve and pickle jars and some for paste (I think these are from Shippams, a Chichester firm). As always there are some that mystify me.

Not really worth calling the Time Team yet. But as deeper items come to light I remain hopeful of older finds, perhaps cider flagons or earthenware jars, we shall see. There was a bronze age burial found very close to the commons, so I shan't stop looking - who knows what I might find?

Chainsaw Massacre

Sadly, quite a few trees were harmed in the taking of these photos!


My polelathe turning and greenwood working has been held up partly by the weather, but also because at short notice I've spent most of the last 2 weeks teaching chainsaw and tree felling for a local college. This comprises organised chaos as 2 trainers try to teach upto a dozen young students safe use of a chainsaw, field maintenance and the finer points of felling and cutting up trees.





The site we've been working at is a large pine plantation on the Surrey borders (between Frensham and Hindhead). Counting the tree rings this Scots Pine was planted about 60 years ago when it was popular to create these dank dismal conifer woods in the belief that it would lead to an efficient intensive forestry industry rather like intensive agriculture. You may notice I am slightly biased in my view of how we manage our environment.


There is a popular myth that much of Englands woodlands disappeared during the first half of the 20th century as a result of timber needs during the wars. But figures show (Oliver Rackham, Woodlands, 2006) that despite the great felling woodland increased as grazing and cultivation ceased during the depression and the creation of the Forestry Commission led to mass planting of conifers.



Sadly much ancient woodland and rare habit was destroyed to further this mistaken belief in the creation of plantations with little or no concern for the environment, or our traditions of woodland management over the centuries. This site is gradually being returned to a mixture of lowland heath and more open natural woodland which will be more beneficial to the environment, for wildlife and, if managed well, for wood from native tree species. For those who don't associate Surrey with large pine plantations and lowland heaths here is a photo of the restored heathland.

Once I've recovered from the overdose of training it will be full speed ahead with green woodwork and also some much overdue landrover maintenance, with much to get done before Christmas arrives.

Apple - The Wonder of Howgate

We have 4 apple trees squeezed into our tiny garden. The youngest of which is an Howgate Wonder which is now starting to produce a crop of large (easily over 6 inch) red apples which can stay on the tree until December.

Originating from the Isle of Wight in 1915 the Howgate Wonder is normally described as a cooking apple. But if you like a cooking apple which is inedible raw and rapidly cooks down to a mush, the Howgate Wonder would be a disappointment for you. In fact its a very versatile apple, initially a cooker, by November its also a good eater and when cooked it holds its shape well, something that I prefer. Apparently it also juices well, although we've not had enough to try it yet. But I did add a couple to the perry I made last year. The apples withstand frost and stay on the tree well after everything else has fallen, they are good keepers right through the winter.


The only problem with leaving them on the tree is that they get noticed. They catch the attention of lots of our neighbours, who regularly ask me 'What are the enormous apples' and before long the birds are also tucking into a feast. I've taken all of the apples off the tree now because we have one blackbird that's making the apples a regular treat. But I've left one for the birds.

We now have a crate of apples stored in a vegbox crate individually wrapped in newspaper, which means that I can make my favourite apple crumble whenever I like.


My favourite recipe is a double crumble! I use about 200g plain flour, 150g soft brown sugar and 150g of butter(warm) that I mix with my fingers (add a teaspoon of cinnamon if you like). Core, peel and roughly chop one large or two smaller apples, place in a pie dish, add a handful of raisins if you like and sprinkle the crumble mix on top. Adjust the amount of apple or crumble mix you use to suit your dish. Cook for around 30minutes at about gasmark 6ish and enjoy. Definitely comfort food and good for breakfast as well!

Birch Attack!

Somebody once told me that trees are best stored standing up. It's a philosophy that I aspire to and it suits me as I like trees and I like to work with the wood, so I try to only take as much as I need.

I've had my eye on a birch tree right behind my wood stack for a couple of years. It's the one in the centre of the photo. It's straight which will be good for turning, but it's days are numbered as it shows signs of being aggressively attacked by a range of fungi. This might be a bonus if the rot has spread inside the wood leaving interesting colours and textures. So I've left it standing until I need it and for the rot to spread, until its not safe to leave it standing any longer.





Last week I decided the rot had spread too far and as it would not see out another season I felled it. Attacked by fungi and now by the chainsaw the tree swiftly succumbed. At firts sight it looks as if the fungi have infected the whole tree and I stand a chance of getting some interesting wood from it. I will post on the wood when I use it in the next few weeks.

You can see from the stump and the butt that the rot has spread to about 80% of the wood at the base of the tree. With no branches at the top its windage was reduced but with so little sound wood it could have fallen at any time in a strong wind.


The rectangular area of torn fibres on the stump is called a hinge. It's used in felling trees to accurately control the direction the tree is felled, which can only fall in the line of least resistance, or at 90 degrees to the long sides of the rectangle. This is a good example - which is just as well as I am teaching it at the moment!