The Old Switch-a-roo

Alreet ladies and gents,

truly a splendid day to be seeing you. Just a very short one today, to say I'm now exactly half-way through my placement year.

This is the point where I switch jobs with the other student who's down here, James, and we take over each other's duties. This means I go from looking after the harvesting and everything to do with that, to FM or Forest Management.

This basically involves most practical aspects of Forestry not to do with cutting trees down: i.e. planting, weed control (spraying, mowing), pest control, fencing, de-stumping, ploughing (both of these are for planting), ride maintenance, etc. I will go into more detail about what these involve and why they do them when I get to them.

Today I just took James for a ride and showed him what I've been doing (not a lot), then got introduced to the contractors who do the de-stumping and told how to look after all our herbicides etc. which are kept in a special lock up. I'll tell you more about de-stumping because it's quite unique to Thetford a bit later, and post some pictures of the cool bird-like machine they use too. That's all for now.

Cheers,

Luke