Portmoak Community Woodland

Haircut for springtime

Any gardeners will know that this February has been a stop start time for getting things done outside: sudden sunshine, then snow, frost and rain. A lot of rain! So it has been quite difficult to complete the task of pruning apple and pear trees in Portmoak Community Orchard.

The trees have been planted in the big gully in Kilmagad Wood which is one of the most sheltered spots on the hill. But that doesn’t protect it from the rain and the slopes get very slippery. Unfortunately, there are some tasks you can’t postpone and pruning  apples and pears is one of them if you want healthy growth in the spring and summer.

So, we give the them a fairly severe ‘haircut’ to encourage lots of fruiting buds on the lower branches.

This project began at the start of the month and couldn't be finished until nearly the end of it, as frozen slush on the ground made the slopes too slidy.

It's a bit of a challenge, weilding loppers, saws and secateurs to prune back overhead branches, while also trying to stay upright!

We are not great experts but our simple aims are to cut out disease, let in plenty of light and make sure the trees don’t get so tall that we can’t reach the fruit. 

It’s hard to imagine we shall get another bumper crop like last year’s but as long as the blossoms are not hit by late frosts and we have a half decent summer, we should have enough fruit for our annual community apple day in the autumn. We enjoyed that prospect as we stopped, in surprisingly warm sunshine, to take a tea break.

That is a long way off and in the meantime we have plenty to do, getting our heads round the Woodland Trust Scotland’s plans for tree felling and peatland restoration in Portmoak Moss.  Members of the community talk to us all the time and we are well aware that everyone who goes to the Moss loves the place for a whole variety of reasons.

In early March, there is to be a workshop involving experts and invited participants, to look at all the issues. This will be followed by a public meeting, with a date tbc.

In the Moss, the business of pulling out birch saplings continues and also in March we are looking forward to welcoming employees from the Scottish Environment Protection Agency, who are allocated volunteering days, to help with projects like this. Removing the birch helps to protect the peat from drying out and allows the growth of sphagnum mosses. 

Our regular meetings continue, on every third Tuesday of the month, in The Well Inn and now start at the earlier time of 6.30pm for 6.45pm. 

PORTMOAK MOSS:CHANGES AFOOT

The future of Portmoak Moss has been a big talking point since December when Portmoak Community Woodland Group helped to organise a four hour drop-in session about what’s being planned. 

Around 50 people came to Portmoak Village Hall on December 10th, to hear about the restoration project, which will see the removal of most of the trees and a return to peat bog. The plans have been drawn up by the Moss owners, Woodland Trust Scotland and Peatland Action, who are part of the government agency, NatureScot.

So many people love the Moss that we weren’t surprised by a deluge of questions about the wildlife, the trees and the future of public access. All these things will be affected. There will be different wildlife, different birds, more mosses and bog plants and changes to some of the pathways.

The restoration project actually began in 1999, when Sitka spruce was removed from the centre of the peat dome. It should never have been there in the first place but it was planted in the 1960s by the Forestry Commission, in response to a national timber shortage. In the event, the trees didn’t grow strong and were never harvested.  Now many of them are blowing down.

Woodland Trust Scotland have been working to bring back what is a very rare, lowland raised peat bog. The Portmoak Community Woodland Group has also been doing its best, over several years, to remove any birch or pine saplings that tried to grow there, because of the danger that they would dry out the peat again. You can see the area where that has worked but elsewhere many of the trees have grown too big to pull out.

Peatland Action have advised that the best way to get the bog onto a sustainable footing is by tackling the whole site. 

So, apart from sections round the fringe where there are trees like birch and rowan, the other, mostly non-native trees will go. 

The current time-scale is to carry out the felling work next winter (2026) with the peatland restoration starting immediately afterwards.  Access will be restricted during the main part of the works but will be restored - with some paths possibly taking new routes when we find out how the water table settles.

There won’t be much habitat left for red squirrels but there is plenty of new woodland in Kilmagad Wood and it contains some of their favourite foods, such as hazelnuts and acorns.  Many woodland birds will be looking for new homes but there will be the right habitat for ground-nesting birds, like meadow pipit and skylark as well as waders, like lapwing and redshank.

It’ll be a few years before everything settles down and signs of the disruption fade away. But some changes will be fast, as different birds and insects, like dragonflies, explore the newly created pools of water. 

We will give more updates, as we get them.