Eleven of us met in the National Trust car park, at the side of what used to be the Wizard Inn, including 3 'newbies' who were with us for the first time.
I'd brought loppers, bowsaws and gloves, safety glasses, fire-lighting items, First Aid and ....cake! - the essentials needed for most workdays, but we needed to collect some extra tools from the Ranger compound. These included wheelbarrows, Tree Poppers and stakes & netting to secure the fire-site after we left.
I'd never seen or used Tree Poppers before and relied on my fellow-MNTVer's who'd done this task previously, to demonstrate how, and how not!, to use one.
Despite my initial trepidation, I discovered how great they are - you 'clamp' the Tree Popper around the base of a small birch tree and use the 'plate' as a lever to ease the tree roots out of the ground - easy-peasy! The down-side is that a Tree Popper is quite a heavy piece of kit, and manoeuvring it into position and carrying it from tree to tree was tiring work, but it was an extremely satisfying task which I loved!!
We got a fire going fairly quickly so we could burn the birch tree's and, with the aid of Jenny's leaf blower, and Jack's fire-lighting expertise, it was a huge success, burning just about everything we pulled up during the day.
An MNTV workday wouldn't be an MNTV workday without the 'traditional' break for morning coffee and cake to refresh our enthusiasm for the task in hand.
This was followed by a lunch break a couple of hours later. Some swapped tasks from Tree Popping to dragging the uprooted tree's to the fire and cutting off the roots before loading the tree's onto the fire. The roots were burnt towards the end of the afternoon as we'd found previously that the soil that remained on the roots, despite a good shaking, was prone to dampening-down the fire.
The weather was dry but the terrain was very uneven, lots of brambles doubling as 'trip-wires' and a drainage ditch traversing the area, so we took our time in moving around to avoid injury.
We all enjoyed the day, worked really hard and got loads done. Some of us were aching in places we'd not ached for some time! I hope that the enthusiasm and hard work of our 3 new attendees, Chris, Tom and Gareth, doesn't put them off future workdays when the muscle-aches kick in later this week!
Christine will be leading another day of birch thinning at Alderley Edge on 20th Feb, which we're already looking forward to:-)
Photo's by Adrian and Sue
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