Monday Motivation

We've only had 2 Mondays at Windmill since the New Year, but we've been doing really good work, motivated by a wish to keep warm! This is the time of year when we harvest some of the trees to get wood cut for burning on site. It's work for the future, because the wood has to dry before it's any use to us, so the wood we're cutting now will probably be burning to cook our pizzas next year. We try to use only our own wood on site, and we harvest a little each year so that we have enough but none goes to waste. Hopefully these makes our wood burning nearly carbon neutral.

Warm feet and hot drinks to come shortly!

They say wood warms you 3 times - when you cut it, when you stack it and when you burn it. That was definitely what we needed today! We made some pierced tin lanterns at our 12th Night event on Saturday, and these need to be filled with ice to stop them squashing when the design is put on. Today, we arrived on site to find that it has been too cold for the ice-cores from those cans to have melted, even though they were thrown into the embers of the fire as we were wetting down the fireplace on Saturday evening!

The saw horse and a bow saw make 2 person sawing work well

Despite the cold conditions, we managed to refrain from belting out excerpts from "Frozen", and instead turned our attentions to lighting a fire. Tracey's preferred method for a quick and reliable fire lighting is to create a platform of dry sticks to insulate and protect the fire from the damp ground, then to put a piece of cotton wool on this that has been rubbed through vaseline. It lights easily and burns hot for long enough to get the fire going, (good alternatives are the top layer of bark peeled from birch trees, or crispy dry orange peel). Adding thin dry sticks, then pencil to finger thickness sticks gives the fire a chance to catch before larger logs go on. We soon had it burning nicely and Dan and Danny did a good job of feeding the fire to keep it small but hot enough to boil a kettle for our break drinks.

Danny tries the pole saw

Dan + pole saw 

So we had fire warmth, and just needed to get the full benefit with the sawing and stacking. We cut down some large branches last week, using our extendable pruning saw, so this week we needed to work to cut it into useful and manageable sizes. Dan, Danny and Jason soon learned the on site protocols and quickly got the hang of the sawing and secateur work, producing a nice sized tray of sorted logs, sticks and fine material.

Dan gets on with cutting the fine material for kindling wood

Whilst we were doing that, Hassan made a great job of repairing the brassica netting, which had been knocked about a bit in the gales. It's a job for a patient person - very fiddly, but he's managed to make it look wonderfully neat, and hopefully pigeon proof, as the purple sprouting broccoli inside is just getting going!

Before we left, we made sure to leave out food for the birds. In this cold weather, it's a life saver.