After I had felled the larch tree, the real work had begun

THE big larch tree in the garden has been on my hit list for some time. Its roots were invading the vegetable plot and it was in the way of a new run and pond for ducks that I’m building. The other day I finally felled it.

By my standards I didn’t make too bad a job of it. There’s minor collateral damage to a cherry tree that got hit a glancing blow but the larch fell more or less where it was supposed to.

I did fell it a bit too early in the year, before it had dropped all its needles and gone into full dormancy. But the ducks were on order, Khaki Campbells for eggs, and I was impatient to get their accommodation finished. And the bonus for my impatience was the wonderful resinous smell that hung over the whole garden as I cut the trunk into rings and split them for firewood.

I’ve tried a couple of the slightly sticky logs on the fire. They burn excellently, with the same great smell, but they do spark a little. Hopefully there will be fewer sparks when the timber has seasoned. If not, the logs will be relegated to the closed stove and the fireplace in the kitchen where there is a tiled floor and no danger of holes in the carpet.

When you fell any kind of tree you end up with a lot of left-overs — twigs and small branches and, in the case of my larch, an amazing amount of little cones. Larches retain their cones after they have shed their seed and they can accumulate on the tree for five or six years.

Foresters call this stuff “lop-and-top” and I always used to stack it in a pile, let it dry and then burn it. Nowadays this is against the law and the countryside is full of rumours of “bonfire police” patrolling the bye-ways and even flying helicopter patrols. I don’t really believe the rumours but I dutifully went out and bought a fairly heavy-duty garden shredder.

It took me two days to feed all the lop-and-top through the shredder but it was satisfying work. At the end of each session I found a few very dry branches and put them through the machine to clean out all the sweet-smelling larch resin that threatened to gum up its internal workings.

I ended up with a small hill of excellent mulch. I stood back and admired it, planning to spread it over the duck run when it was finished. Strangely enough, although ducks are water-birds, the domestic varieties do not thrive if their feet are wet and muddy. The mulch would avoid this and inhibit the growth of stinging nettles.

Stinging nettles are the bane of anyone who keeps poultry outdoors. They have a very high nitrogen requirement and bird droppings are rich in nitrogen. One answer is to keep guinea-fowl which, I have found, are the only domestic birds that will eat nettle shoots. But then you have to put up with the noise that guinea-fowl make.

I had to change my plans a couple of days later when I discovered that my neat hill of mulch had turned into a volcano. There was a plume of steam issuing from the summit. I plunged my hands into the middle of the pile and it was hotter than a hot bath.

This never happens to me when I’m trying to make compost and need the heat to kill the weed seeds. But my sappy pile of mulch was doing what my compost heap refuses to do so I had to get out a rake and spread it out. In a layer a few centimetres deep it stopped heating up and started to dry.