02-11-2017: Dig and burn at Kingston University

During the last two weeks, KUBAG has been busy at Tolworth Court and Kingston Hill

At Tolworth Court we have continued our work on improving ditches next to the sports pitches both for wildlife and drainage.

The team starting to dig and clear out the ditch

Firstly they cut away the side  and in-channel vegetation...

...before shaping the bank edge

During the event we saw a very hairy caterpillar; the hairs appeared to catch on the work gloves, so I wouldn’t recommend handling this one with bare hands. A bit of book work and google images makes us think that we might have found the caterpillar for the Ruby Tiger Moth.

Who did you think we are?

Our work also involved cutting back on sections of scrub to maintain a mosaic of short and tall habitat which is important for the reptiles that live on our site. While checking the reptile mate for other animals (reptiles should have started to enter hibernation by now) we found two clutches of insect eggs.

We don’t know what they are, or if the clearer eggs are the same species at a different stages of development, or a different insect.

What do you guys think? Are we correct in our identification of the Ruby Tiger Moth? Can you suggest another likely suspect?

If any of you are insect experts and can suggest a line of investigation for the eggs, please post your comment in the comments box.

Progress on the day

We made good progress, but still had a ways to go to finish the section of ditch, so we might be back here in January/February (watch this space).

Diggers in the sun

Last Saturday we had our biannual woodland workshop. For the first time ever we worked with seasoned wood rather then green wood, using a technique called burning out.

Health and safety talk at the start and throughout

You may be familiar with techniques that use fire to etch/burn engravings onto wood, this technique goes a step further, by using embers and the controlled application of their heat to burn out sections of wood to create the void for a bowl.

Shaping the outside curve of the bowl before burning out

It was important that we used seasoned wood, to ensure a clean and controlled burn/charring, which wouldn’t be achieved/achieved easily, using green wood. Seasoning (drying out of the wood) varies in time depending on the species of tree. It can take anywhere from 6 months to a year.

Controlled slow application of heat using a hot ember

The charred wood was scraped out, while tools can be used, the nice thing is that every day items can be re-used/re-purposed for this without having to by expensive tools, such as the shells we used on the day. 

A new form of shelling

To finish the bowls, the surface was sanded (the extent of the sanding is up to individual tastes) and then oiled to bring out the grain of the wood.

The nearly finished bowls after some sanding for some

Using our blows and platters

I know that  volunteers who attended the day really enjoyed themselves and were talking about how to source wood to do the project in their own time. While we don’t harvest native trees on our site, we do produce an excess of wood when we are undertaken removal of invasive rhododendron plants. 

While the wood from rhododendron can’t be used for food utensils or bowls as it contains a toxin, it would be suitable for general bowls and ornamentation, and would be a lovely way to reuse the bi-product of removing this invasive plant. 

This leads me nicely to promote our next rhodo bash :)

It will be on Saturday the 25th November at Kingston Hill from 10am to 4.30 pm.

If you can make it, please email me by the 20th of Nov on biodiversity@kingston.ac.uk with your contact phone number, email address and also if you have any dietary allergies, as we always provide snacks to say thank you for volunteering.