Ooops!

Ok, so it's been a while, I must have been busy!  Well, I have I guess.  I did eventually manage to get a plant survey done on the hill.  Really quite interesting actually, but will be going back to look again as spring brings in more variety and developments.  I've also been working really hard on finding out about badgers, and how much of a problem they are going to be with fencing etc.  The amount of paths they have crisscrossing the hill is incredible, and I don't want to be installing a hundred badger gates.  Also the fencing near the main sett needs replacing so I needed to find out about legalities of digging near setts.  Apparently, if you are caught near a badger sett with spade you are assumed to be badger digging and will be prosecuted as such!  Licences to carry outs works near badger setts are recommended!


Aside from that, we have started work on our practical project at uni.  We have a footpath to restore.  A lot of clearance work, the replacement of four gates and a footbridge to rebuild!  It's a great project, but after all the rain we've had the site is an absolute quagmire!  Yesterday, even though it wasn't raining, I wore waterproofs for mud limitation, I was still filthy and had condensation all up inside them! Not very pleasant.  Tomorrow, we are back on site and the weather is meant to be sunny and fairly warm, so I'm going to go with spare trousers instead!  No photos yet, I'll do a before and after of the entire project when we've finished.

Instead, here's a new fungus for me that I found at the footpath site during a break.  It's an Earthfan, a member of the Thelephora species. I've not found one before, so nice find for me. Sorry, second picture is a little blurry!

Rain, rain, rain and books!

I'm very frustrated at the weather currently,  I wanted to do a plant survey on the hill.  I also have an overwhelming urge to get out wild camping.  That's not going to happen right now, with gale force winds and torrential rain.  So I've been working on my woodland assignment for Uni.  That's frustrating me too, not the assignment, but the fact that a book I'd really like for both uni work and personal interest is so bloody expensive.  I guess it's because so much work goes into these scientific works, but still, an old book, many years out of date, second hand, still costs a fortune!  We have a great library at the uni, but sometimes you just want them on your own bookshelf.  I love books. I had a Kindle for a while, and they certainly have their place, but you just can't beat an actual book!


Oh and another thing!  I spent ages the other day, trawling through Blogger, trying to find blogs to follow.  Finding a current, active blog, with similar topics and interests as me, is nigh impossible!  So, if you drop by, and you think I may like your blog, please drop me a comment, and I will pop over and take a look.  Thank you :)

Busy!

Well since being laid up last week, I've been really busy!  Saturday we had to go to Welshpool to pick up OH's car from the garage. We had to leave early so we thought we'd make a day of it and headed onto the old Iron Age fort at Oswestry.  Nice for a walk round if you're in the area.  I believe it's the biggest of it's kind in the UK. Then we walked the woods at Rodney's Pillar.  That's also a cracking walk.  I didn't make it to the top this time, as I'm still very tired, but it was a good walk all the same.

On Sunday OH went climbing with the boys, and I had a wander on the land we are looking at to check the fencing.  There's quite a large section there that will need replacing.  I had the pleasure of spotting a woodcock and a gorgeous big hare, but sadly no photos!  That reminds me, in the morning I was sat just outside the door with a cup of coffee, and a sparrowhawk flew through the yard, just inches from the floor, and just feet from me!  Again no photo, but an image I will retain for sometime anyway!  Later that afternoon I took my eldest daughter for a drive.  She's had four professional lessons so far and is doing well.  She tackled some quite tricky stuff around the lake at Clywedog and in the Hafren Forest.  It wasn't as scary as I thought it might have been!

On Monday I had a field trip with Uni, to study some woodland.  We did a biodiversity study on higher plants, and looked at the regeneration of the part of the woodland that had once been planted with conifers.  It's all very interesting and hopefully will be put to good use for myself one day!

Tuesday was Practical Estate Skills, and green woodworking again.  I'm not going to produce any photos yet.  I'm going to wait until the gates are installed in our footpath project, which we will be starting next week.  Can't wait to get on with it and see everything in place!

Yesterday, the weather was appalling, we've had so much rain the rivers are fit to burst.  I drove into Uni, as I had an appointment yesterday afternoon, and the road to Aberystywth was a nightmare by the time I came home.  Luckily I had four lectures, so wasn't outside much!  Anyway, after uni, I went to visit someone who used to keep Tamworth pigs for bracken clearance.  She has 15 acres of woodland that was swamped by 8ft bracken!  The pigs have done an amazing job, and so has she, replanting over 6,000 trees!  Hopefully she will be a useful contact for us in the future.

So today, we have storm Doris.  My OH decided it was the best time to be in the mountains, and has headed to Cadair Idris!  I'm sure he has a bloody screw lose.  86mph winds and heavy snow?  Complete nutjob!!  I have stayed at home, as I'm the sensible one.  I have a new assignment to get on with; a report on the woodland we surveyed on Monday.

I also got my first semester results today, and I'm happy to say I've got through with a 1:1, so couldn't be happier.  Let's just hope I can keep it up, with everything else that's going on!

Going slightly mad....

I have the worst cold.  Not a happy bunny.  I missed uni on Tuesday, managed to crawl in for Wednesday, and even missed the early bus home, because I was working so hard on an assignment, but have been in bed since!  Colds don't normally affect me much, I just get on with it, but this has really knocked me for six.  I've not been sleeping and feel weak and useless.  Very frustrating.  Really getting cabin fever now!  I'm going out tomorrow if it kills me!

Mixed Feelings

I did end up going out the day of my last post.  It was a bit hair raising in the woods.  The wind was howling.  When I got home I logged onto the woodland for sale website to get the phone number for the North Wales agent.  I was going to give him a call and discuss a deposit for the woodland with him.  Sadly when I got onto the website it appears that someone else has beaten me to it.  Gutted to say the least, I had big plans for that place!  It's certainly knocked me back a bit.  But I have re-centred my attention on some land that I was looking at a couple of years ago.  The guy wanted to much for it, but he's not sold, so maybe there's a chance that I could get it cheaper.  Not quite the woodland of my dreams, but cheaper and still with potential.

Went out looking for edible mushrooms today.  Found a few Scarlet Elfcaps and a few Jelly Ears, but not the Velvet Shanks I had been hoping for.  Not ones that were worth eating anyway.  Lots of fungi still to find though, unbelievable that people think the season is over by winter.  Anyway I was going to attempt a wild mushroom chutney, but without the Velvet Shanks it wouldn't have been right with just ears and elfcaps!  So I made it with plain old button mushrooms instead.  If it's nice, I'll make it with oyster mushrooms when mine are ready.

We did map and compass work last week with Uni.  That was pretty cool, they dragged us all over the hills surrounding Plynlimon.  According to the fitbit I walked 24,746 steps and climbed 139 floors!  We're going to start looking at our footpath project tomorrow, so that should be quite interesting.

I'll leave you with some Turkey Tails (Trametes versicolor).  They are a rather pretty bracket fungus and are plentiful at the moment.

Scuppered!

It was my first day back in lectures yesterday.  I was tired, back to 6.30 starts again, and sore!  PES on Tuesday found a few muscles I hadn't used for a while! So starting at nine yesterday morning, I had four lectures back to back.  No breaks, just enough time to get from one to the next! Ye, I know, poor student having to sit around for four hours, but with three brand new modules introduced and our first assignment set, it was hard to concentrate.  The new modules are;

Land Use:  Most of our land use in this country is agriculture, so this module will be a lot of that!

People & the Countryside:  This covers everything from legal stuff, to funding.  May be a bit boring at times, but useful stuff to know.

British Habitats:  This is the one I am really looking forward to.  We'll be studying all the different types of habitat, what they mean and what's happening to them.

Our first assignment is a presentation on agriculture for Land Use. Shouldn't be too bad to do, easy enough, but shocked to have been given it in the first lecture!

On Thursdays I am meant to have a lecture, but I've told them I won't be going in.  Because I have to commute, an hour each way on the bus, I have to leave the house at 7.15 every morning and don't get back until 5, and some days 7.  It's not worth giving up my whole day for a one hour lecture.   Lectures are recorded so I can catch up with what I have missed tomorrow morning, before lectures start again.

So my plan today was to get out and about, maybe try and find some more Oyster mushrooms in the woods, to start a big outdoor straw bed.  But the weather is awful, the wind is howling a gale, and I'm not sure that the woods would be the best place right now.  I'll see if it improves at all, but in the meantime, there is plenty of other interesting things I can do!

Practical Estate Skills

Back to uni today, so I'll tell you a little about what I'm up to!  Had a great day today, we've been green woodworking.  A little more on that later but first let me tell you about what else we've been up to previously.

Stock Fencing

Tree Felling

Tool Repair

Hedging

Tree Planting

Stile Making

Dry Stone Walling

Please excuse the odd formatting, I'm still getting my head around how this works!

Anyway, I've thoroughly enjoyed learning all these things, they are mostly definitely a skilled job and we've only touched the surface, but hopefully I've learnt some new skills which I can build on in the future.

Today we took fresh cut chestnut logs and split them down into rustic posts to make a gate.  Lots of hard work and no gate yet, hopefully we'll get to finish it soon.  We have to restore a footpath as a project for the semester, and this gate will be part of it.  I will obviously post an update when it is installed.

Green Woodworking

Back to normal lectures tomorrow, with kick off at 9am.  Three brand new modules to get stuck into, and no doubt some assignments soon!