Litter Picking

Roughly once a month I spend an hour or so picking litter from my woodland, mostly from the 300m verge next to the A24.  Initially, when I was dealing with the backlog from many years of neglect,  I would stop after I had filled 2 large bags, usually having reached about half way along the verge.  I always litter pick south to north, so that I am facing the oncoming traffic.  Although I am not actually on the road, I'm near enough to worry about people failing to stay on the road.   Indeed, early on I have had to remove large parts of cars that were clearly the remnants of crash damage.  Trees are a lot tougher than they look!
I've used different methods, my current kit is a high quality litter picker, waterproof gloves, and a litter picking hoop to hold the collection bag open.

Most of the litter is chucked out of passing cars.   I don't really understand why they can't take it home, it feels like it's more effort to wind down the window and just chuck it out.  And it's mostly food and drink - sandwich wrappers, cans, bottles etc.

 But there are also more unusual items.  The pic below shows a silencer box, found this month, It's about 500mm long, so not a trivial item to throw from a passing car, more likely something that fell off and got pushed to the side.

I've found a pair of trainers, an old boot (always useful when fishing) carrier bags full of I don't know what (didn't look) and a bookcase.  The last is probably fly tipping, rather than littering, but it's all of a piece with people who somehow imagine that the world is full of magic tidy-uppers.  

I'd really like to charge the fast food vendors for the mess they facilitate in my wood. 

Downslink bus - park and ride?

Bob Bayley (Surrey Ad : letters 18/Mar/16) offers us a pretty vision of a guided busway on the Downslink.  It’s good that he (or Balfour Beatty) has come up with some ideas about how this might be funded, and the suggested £25 million cost.  

This looks low; the nearest similar scheme I could find was the Cambridgeshire guided busway between St Ives & Cambridge, at 15 miles and outturn cost of £180 million.  This is double tracked, so a rough cost per mile of £6 million per mile for single track would give a cost of £48 million for the 8 miles from Cranleigh to a junction point on the A3100.  This is still lower than a tramway, which would likely cost £104 million. 

However, all is not lost - although it might be for the suppliers of guided bus track components.  The big advantage of a bus on this route would be its ability to use conventional roads at each end.  Single track tarmac, suitable width for one way working with passing places at Bramley station would cost around £10 million, and this is well proven technology.

He does not mention what route he proposes to get from the Downslink to Guildford station.  My preference would be to connect to the A3100 south of the railway bridge, using traffic lights to phase the bus into the road traffic there.  Also traffic lights would be needed at the crossings at Station Rd in Bramley and on the A281.    Rising bollards would be needed at the junctions and at start and end of the Downslink section  to prevent other traffic attempting to use the route.  At the Cranleigh end one would need to consider whether there would be enough demand from Dunsfold itself to justify the bus starting from there, or whether it would be better to have a park and ride start point where the Downslink crosses the B2130.  Or possibly both. 

These schemes tend to fall down on the demand side: people are reluctant to abandon their cars for buses, however pretty, they would often rather sit in traffic jams.  However, a park and ride scheme to Guildford rail station, with pick up points south of Bramley and near Shalford station, including a peak hours congestion charge between Shalford & Guildford, would be feasible.  Two 300 place car parks would cost around £6 million to build, ( costs from the South Tay P&R project 2010) and would not involve fencing the Downslink or major civil engineering works in people’s back gardens. The existing park and ride schemes into Guildford are popular and well used: let’s build on that success.

This is not the first time Bob Bayley has proposed such a scheme.  See http://www.cranleighsociety.org/2015/05/17/the-future-of-the-downslink/ , and I quote from there “The reopening of the [rail] line was looked at again ... in 2013, as part of Surrey County Council’s rail strategy and was still not considered to be viable.”  

Firewood and the toast rack

I store my potential firewood in 2m by 3m woodpiles, using stakes at 1m intervals round the boundary to hold the wood together.  I'll post more about that another time.  I keep the wood largely in two forms:   small diameter (up to 10-15 cm) as cordwood (long pieces) and larger diameter as roundwood (up to the size I can move; bigger than that gets split before going into the pile.  See below.    The advantage of this is that if anyone decides to take some of my wood, they need to do the work to make it a suitable size to burn rather than me, which is less irritating for me, and makes it less likely to happen.

When converting cordwood into firewood lengths (about 20 cm) I start off when working a new woodpile by setting up a "toast rack"

Empty toast rack

The posts are about 1.5m, sharpened, and bonked in with my post bonker so that they are firmly embedded in the ground.  They're about 20cm apart in each row, and maybe 50cm between the rows.  The distance between the rows depends on your chainsaw, mine has a 16" bar.  Then at the bottom I put a some timber that I don't mind just sawing into, so that I can easily saw right through the wood I'm working on.

Full toast rack

Then I stack the cordwood between the two rows

Firewood

And saw down.  I start at the far ends of the pile, working inwards from both ends to keep it balanced, then sawing between the posts.   One thing  to watch out for is that as the lengths of wood being sawed get shorter, they may decide to spin rather than be cut, which can be a bit disconcerting, and sometimes pieces of wood fly out, so it's important to stand so that they won't hit you (and of course personal protective equipment).    And there it is.  In 10-15 minutes with the chainsaw, all that wood is now ready to burn.

Decaying Hornbeams?

In summer last year we had a lot of bark stripping, particularly on our hornbeam trees, from squirrels.

Hornbeam has quite thin bark, and it seems that squirrels like to strip bark as some sort of competition.  I've already felled half a dozen which had been almost completely stripped, and I'm hoping that they will regrow as coppice.  If not, they weren't going to survive anyway,  I recently noticed this group of hornbeams, which I think have had their bark stripped and then some sort of decay.   I've seen recommendations that anything like this should be removed more or less immediately, but also it's good to provide standing deadwood for the creatures.  My current plan is that, as we are getting into bird nesting time, I'm going to leave them till about October this year, and then fell them.