Restoring ancient woodlands the violent way, fixing boats and making my niece happy

I really enjoyed chronicling my chaos in the last post and and apparently so did you! You've asked me for more and I am happy to oblige, but due to all the chaos I am a week behind. Thankfully I found an hour by a fire with a bottle of wine to catch up a little.

Week 50: 8th to 14th December 2025

Monday - After a whole lot of soggy tree planting and zero pay last week I took a morning to sit inside and catch up with computer work. I've been helping out at Scalar, an tech company working on OpenAPI tooling very much picking up the mantle of my old employer Stoplight, who got acquifired into SmartBear. Now all their old customers (many of whom I convinced to use Stoplight in the first place) are fleeing the ship. It's absolutely amazing to help these folks find a new home and catch up with familair faces in the process.

In the afternoon I rushed off to meet my amazing girlfriend Emily, who took a train west to look at apartments and rock climb with me. We went hard and immediately blew up, a classic when we've not been going for a while. With this being my only day off for a while we committed to watching as much Adventure Time as possible (recently restarting from Season 1).

Tuesday - Back to Pucklechurch for more planting with the South Gloucestershire team! It was absolutely hooning it down, far far worse than the vaguely wet that scared off all the volunteers last weekend. I very much didn't want to be there, but after moaning about quiters in the last post the last thing I was going to do was bring up leaving.

So we worked away, just me and a chap called Tom shouting through another named storm over his broken hearing aid for a bit until we settled into a rhythm. After 45 minutes one of the organizers turned up and said nobody else is coming, and shortly after declared the storm has won so let's get out of here.

Phew! Somebody else quat first. I was desperate to get out of there but would never had quat myself.

That gives me time to go and get my various chainsaws ready for what comes tomorrow, with what seems like some sort of angle grinder on a hinge that'll help sharped the hell out of some chainsaw chains (and probably my fingers) with a workbench to attach it to.

My thankfully blunt fingers managed to pack up the van in Bath and set off for Taunton, arriving with just enough time for a cheeky cider with the gang.

Wednesday - Chainsaaaaw time!

Protect Earth planted 5,000 trees for the Wood Could Should team over the last few years at their first site in Stawley, near Taunton. It's right next to an ancient woodland, so a few folks asked "why wouldn't you just wait for natural regeneration to take place?"

A fair question, but that ancient woodland is all bollocks. It's various types of non-native conifers and nothing much else. That makes it a "Plantation on an Ancient Woodland" which is still considered an ancient woodland by the Woodland Trust, Wildlife Trust, etc., but most of its indicator species are gone. Above ground there's not enough native species to seed the field before the heat-death of the universe. The soil however is important, hiding decades - even centuries - of seeds and fungal networks, all being shaded so much they will never germinate without intervention.

How do we do that? Mainly thinning away the trees that should not be there. You can see almost no light getting to the floor here and all the light which is is due to last years thinning.

Don't go rushing in wildy cutting everything down, that's daft for a lot of reasons, but one is that you'll bog it all down in bramble and the seeds that do germinate but weren't expecting to be thrust into that sort of system will fail. Get a few out here and there. It's harder work, but if you're smart and have skillful folks with you it's gonna be just fine. This is exactly what we did at High Wood, and will do the same on this site, and every other ancient woodland we restore.

Despite this ex-software engineer not having the worlds best felling form, Protecter (Protect Earther?) Michael was there with decades of experience to provide overwatch, and make sure all three of us got back to the cabin for a bit of RnR.

Thursday - Another day of it. Flooding all over the area meant the country lanes were an exciting treat, but the new van championed through and we had everything we needed on site.

Since the Struggle Bus was destroyed in July, I am stuck with a regular ass van with no solar panels or inverter. Getting stuck into the electric chainsaw this hard without reliable battery charging (a single 12v lighter socket on a motionless electric van does not work out how you'd want it to) meant I had to give up on being full electric, and switched to a sad old petrol chainsaw the charity has laying around. I do hate burning fossil fuels for any reason, but sometimes its for the greater good, and I've got a plan to bring the lectric chainsaw back into action in the field.

We got stuck in, felling conifers and rescuing struggling native species shaded out by unwelcome competition.

We snedded it all up and left the cuts long, giving this community interest group plenty of timber to plank up, and of course Protect Earth will be helping them mill that into planks with a mobile saw mill.

3pm down tools. 4pm in the van. Rush back to Bath. Emily time!

Friday - All this chainsawing is well and good but I've not done anything paid since Monday and all this mileage only gets reimbursed at about 8p/mile despite costing ~29p/mile, and my credit cards are suffering after buying a million things to fix my shit boat.

I decided to get some serious work done, and off it was to see Julian Cheal. One of my clients needs all sorts of guides written about how to use their tools with all sorts of programming languages and frameworks, and who better to help with the Rails guide than one of the best Rails programmers around.

We got a bunch of hours on the clock, then swapped out our tech hats for charity hats. Julian is also Protect Earth's Tech Trustee, and acting site manager of a secret ancient woodland. We wandered off with ciders in hand to fix a few broken locks and busted carpentry, then got a fire on to discuss the finer points of this current political climate where nobody could hear us.

Saturday - I've been avoiding my new canal boat the best I can, but post-fire myself and Julian shambled off to the boat and tried to stay alive when even the heating system had frozen. It turns out in our haste and excitement to fix the wood stove "back boiler" last summer (a heat exchanger that shares heat from stove to radiators throughout the boat) we did not even consider adding antifreeze, which you absolutely need - at roughly 25%.

Combine the frozen pipes with an absolutely junked electronics (this type of back boiler needs enough juice to run a 12v pump to move the water around) and it was a coooold night.

I caved and buying a petrol generator like everyone else on the canals, but we knew the inverter would need some configuring to accept that input. Julian had been researching my Victron "Phoenix" inverter, and knew we'd need a MK3 to USB cable which I already had from the Struggle Bus, some software called VE.Config which was Windows only, and therefore we needed to install Windows on one of our Macs to get any further.

FINE. Back to the woods. Grab the van. Off to his house. Tasty breakfast and computering. Drive to the boat. Van sounds like its wheel is going to fall off. Dump it in a canal lay-by. Walk a while. Get to work on the inverter.

After about four hours of him doing that, we realized we needed an MK2 inverter, and instead of throwing our laptops into the sea we just went to the pub. Got chatting to a local farmer neighbor who I've been trying to locate for ages and got invitations to his place any time to work out some shared conservation work that benefits us both.

Eventually walked Julian home for a warm spot in his spare room, because tomorrow we had big plans.

Sunday - My sister had the audacity of spending every single penny she could scrape together between now and 2070 on a house which is relatively new but obviously complete shit through and through. The walls in my nieces' room look like someone had been blowing cigar smoke onto certain points for a decade straight, so me and Julian got those whitewashed. The light switches were falling apart so we got that done too. Cupboards are falling off the wall so we bought new hinges. All for the low low price of a cheeky BKs and a couple of ciders.

BIT OF A WEEK.