We are happy to share the news that we’ve been offered the opportunity to take on the stewardship of a beautiful piece of young woodland not far from Sparkford in Somerset.

The mixed broadleaved woodland was planted twenty years ago and has grown well. The land includes a beautiful small lake to the west which is surrounded on its other sides by some of the neighbouring farms pasture fields.

The woodland includes a number of beautiful veteran oak and ash trees along what was the old field boundaries. The rest of the wood consists of oak, cherry, ash, willow, elder, hawthorn and chestnut.

Sloe thickets stretch alongside the storm ditch between the woods and the lake

We visited the woods one afternoon in late September to see how the chestnuts were ripening. Just as it was getting dark we were happy to stumble across a line of giant puffballs arcing off into the gloom like ghostly stepping stones. Twenty eight in all! We picked a few that didn’t look too old and hadn’t been heavily attacked by the slugs which were clearly also very happy to find them.

Sadly many of the younger ash have signs of dieback disease so it will be good to take those which are heavily affected out before the wood rots too much and they start falling apart. It will however open up some space in the woodland and present some opportunities for new plantings.

We’ve begun to incorporate more food growing within this woodland environment. We’ve started planting some gooseberry, wild garlic, some heavy cropping chestnut and hazel varieties, apple, nut bearing pines, cherry plum, apricot plum and hardy bitter lemon. We’ve got a friend whos been very successful grafting plums onto sloe bushes and once they get a bit bigger we plan to graft some twigs from the productive chestnuts onto the established trees that dont have such good nuts.