Where the mushrooms and the ash dieback are

The Woods.

A few acres of mixed woodland at the edge of the holding. It produces mushrooms, wild garlic, firewood and, at the moment, a serious quantity of dead ash.

At: 1.6 miles
Produces: Mushrooms, garlic, firewood
Problem: Ash dieback

The whole route Watch it live

On the walk

What is here.

Ash dieback has been through this wood as it has been through most of southern England. The standing dead have to come down where they are near a track or a boundary, because a dead ash does not fail gracefully — it drops limbs without warning and then the whole tree goes at once.

What is left is oak, field maple, hazel and a great deal of light on a floor that has not seen much for thirty years. Some of that is a loss and some of it is an opportunity, and it is too early to say which is winning.

Mushrooms come out of here, and wild garlic, and both end up in a crisp packet. Chapter 22 was called Mushrooming and Ocado reported searches for lion’s mane up 482 per cent week-on-week after it aired.

The record

What happened here.

The woodland was, under conventional arable accounting, dead ground: it grows nothing you can combine and costs money to keep safe. Under the current arithmetic it produces a crisp, a scheme payment and firewood.

That inversion — the unproductive parts of a farm out-earning the productive ones — is the single most important thing British agriculture has learned in a decade, and almost nobody outside the industry knows it.

At
1.6 miles: Produces
Mushrooms, garlic, firewood: Problem
Ash dieback

How it was made

The arithmetic

What it costs to keep.

The Woods

Felling a dead ash near a track: £300 to £900 a treeDepending on how awkward it is.
Ash lost here: Most of themThe same as everywhere else in southern England.
What it produces: Mushrooms, wild garlic, firewoodAnd a scheme payment.
Replanting: Oak, hazel, field mapleOn a timescale nobody involved will see the end of.

Costs are indicative ranges for work of this kind in this part of the country, not invoices. Where a figure is a published estate number rather than a general one, it says so in the row.

On the walk