Yeah Boii...!!!!!!!!.

Tree-ditions is commissioned to work with local authorities in providing personal development courses for young people.  One of these courses includes participants working towards John Muir Awards and Heritage Hero Awards. As part of the course content participants are encouraged to share their experiences, this fantastic group of girls have chosen  to use a blog to be hosted here. This group finished in October 2018. This is their experience in their own words.

Introduction
As part of the Bridges and East Lothian Works project, we went to the woods 2 days a week for 10 weeks to achieve the Heritage Heroes Award and John Muir Award with Tree-ditions. During these 10 weeks we looked at different types of trees, how to identify them and what they were good for. We learned survival skills such as fire lighting, putting up a shelter, outdoor cooking, foraging and tracking and traditional green wood working skills. Below is a more in depth look at what we have achieved.

Fire Lighting
How to Start a Fire

1. Gather your materials (different size, dry sticks)
2. Make a bird nest out of dry tinder
3. Add the ember extender to the nest
4. Use a source of ignition to create sparks
5. Close the birds nest into a tight bundle and blow
6. Keep blowing until there’s fire
7. Put the tinder pile onto the fire pit and add the small sticks on top of the flame, blow again if necessary
8. Then add the medium size sticks on top to add height to the fire
9. Put the biggest sticks on the top and make a pyramid shape
10. Place kindling around the fire to dry them out and make them ready to use as fuel

4 Things a Fire Needs

1. Oxygen
2. Fuel
3. Heat/ignition source
4. Height

Feather Sticks

1. Get a sharp knife and a piece of wood
2. Slice the corners of the wood and stop just before the bottom
3. Keep doing this until there is a big bundle of it at the bottom

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Animal Tracking
Identifying Footprints

• Looking at wet mud for any prints
• Flattening the mud to make prints clearer

Identifying Poop
Identifying Feathers
Badger Sett
Foraging
Who Made What Hole?
Who Ate That?
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Stool Making

1. Chop a log into 3 or 4 pieces
2. Use the axe to shape the legs to your design
3. Use the shave horse to remove tool marks
4. Use the drill to cut a tennon
5. Use the saw to make space for a wedge
6. Chop up wood for wedges and shape them
7. Saw a plank of wood to your preferred size
8. Mark out where you want your legs to go
9. Use an auger to create holes for your legs
10. Insert your legs into the holes and fit position them how you want them
11. Put the wedges into the slit in the legs and hammer in until they don’t go in any further
12. Use a flat saw to remove excess leg and wedges
13. Use a rasp to get rid of any tool marks
14. Shape the seat to how you’d like
15. Use sandpaper over the stool to make it smooth
16. Use oil on the stool

Spoon Making

1. Harvest some sycamore wood
2. Remove any side branches with a sharp knife
3. Choose what part of the wood you’d like as your spoon
4. Split the wood down the middle
5. Remove the pith with a knife
6. Draw a spoon onto the wood
7. Put stop cuts under the bowl of the spoon and start shaping the handle
8. Use a spoon knife to carve out the bowl of the spoon
9. Use sandpaper to finish
10. If you want to use the spoon for food, use a food grade oil such as walnut oil (if you’re not allergic to nuts), olive oil etc.
11. If you’re keeping the spoon as an ornament use regular oil

​Bark Weaving

1. We harvested a very large piece of lime tree
2. We then sawed it into lengths without knots
3. We used a knife and a stick to cut through the bark
4. Then we peeled the bark off the wood, soaked it in a bucket of water and cleaned all the sap off
5. After all the sap was cleaned off, we measured it and cut it into strips. With each strip we peeled it apart to form two pieces.
6. We lay the strips in a line wove over and under to create a basket

 

Tree Felling

• Find a good tree
• Step cuts – To prevent tearing to stop the tree getting a disease
• Lots of sawing
• This is done in a sustainable way to encourage regrowth

We learned to identify trees through looking at the buds and leaves. We learned what properties the different types of wood has e.g. Ash trees are strong so it can be used for handles, legs etc. and lime gave us bark for weaving baskets and cordage.

Roots

• Locate a good pine tree and dig
• Dig along to expose as much of the root as possible
• This can be harvested to use for sewing and binding

We used long, thin roots which will not cause the tree any harm. These are easily manipulated after soaking and scraping.

​Outdoor Cooking

• Lentil Soup
• Pizza
• Fried Onions and Potatoes
• Rice and Curry
• Pasta
• Barbecue

We learned to lay fires e.g. criss cross fires to create large embers for cooking on

​Sawing

• Fire wood
• Stools
• Spoons
• Branches

Sawing is more difficult than it looks and you need a whole load of patience for it.

​Pole Lathe

• To make round items e.g. handles, spindles

This involved using sharp hand tools, such as gouges and chisels.
The pole lathe is a human powered green wood turning tool.

Axes

• Chopping fire wood
• Shaping the stool legs
• Splitting
• Throwing

Axes are very versatile and an important tool for working in the woods, but you must learn to use them safely
 
Woodland Management

• We extended a dead hedge upwards to try and prevent deer jumping into the coppice and eating the young trees.
• We scythed lang grass to stop it swamping young trees/

 

​Putting Up a Shelter
Knots

1. Round turn and two half hitches
2. Clove Hitch
3. Kleim Heist

This shelter would keep the rain off while we worked outdoors

​Conclusion
In conclusion, we learned how to use traditional tools, how to survive in the wilderness, the need to look after wild places to increase biodiversity, how to harvest wood from a tree without harming it, the need to look after the number of living organisms in this wilderness. The woodland we found was surrounded by arable farm land, crops with little biodiversity. This showed us the importance of helping to conserve these wild places to increase biodiversity.
Using the traditional tools and making things with them helped us connect with our past. As our ancestors would have did the same things in times gone by.