Hazel Harvesting.

It's not the ideal time of year, one should really wait til the leaves have fallen, but it's not a big deal. Let's just have the pics!
Spot the stave in the left pic!
It's that nice straight limb growing up just right of centre.
The top section isn't as straight as it appears from this angle but I got a lovely 6' piece and a slightly wobbly 5' piece.
You can see that after cutting it, I've tidied the cut up to a nice angle so the rain will run off, it will die back cleanly, and may regrow from just below that point.

I've included a shot of thinner Hazel wands growing up, the colour variation is startling, the dark redish bark is like that on the Hazel bow on my Website, the more silvery bark is more common, yet they are both growing from the same trunk. This sort of thing is what makes tree identification so tricky (especially in winter when you are more likely to be cutting timber.)

I cut one other piece, rather skinny but with nice bark, there was little growing from the top of it, so I wasn't harming the tree. It might make a quick survival bow, by just chopping away the belly and putting a string on it, really primitive.
It's the vertical bit growing up from the big angle limb bottom right.

My memory was playing tricks on me in the last post, the big piece hasn't got smooth bark, it's the little runty bit which has the gunmetal smooth bark, maybe that's just Bowyer's optimism, limbs never look quite so good second time round!