With the oak tree down it has left a rather large gap, and although it was set back form the hedge by a good 14ft it feels very empty down there now.
But it has let a good amount of light into the old hedge that runs in parallel to it. It's also made me realise how much this hedge needs some work, especially this first section. It's very gappy, with the trees that are left looking very little like a hedge.
Want to seize the bull by the horns I decided to keep on working with the wood on our land and lay a bit of this hedge.
It wasn't easy, a lot was rotten, some was too old to do anything with.
I think as hedges go this wasn't a beginners hedge! I did have a friend I could ask for advice from and send pictures to (just one bit with the hazel).
I used only materials from our own smallholding, a lot of willow stakes (the bark stripped from the bottoms), anything I could find as binders, willow, hazel, even cherry seedlings. I'm sure it's what they would have done in the past.
I filmed the whole process. It's amazing how about 8 hours of footage can be edited down to 20 minutes, but I hope I got the essence of it there and I hope it's an enjoyable watch.
Where the elder was growing I decided to coppice it completely. Nothing else was growing around it, and it was too big to lay. The gap this has created I will replant with hazel and hawthorn. The plants are already on order!
It's a job I'm pleased with. Not professional by any standards, but done in a "farmer" style, using what we have to hand and hopefully will see this hedge come back strong in years to come. If find time in the next few months I may work a bit further down the hedge, but as always I have a hundred jobs to do, so that's unlikely. Still a bit eery year is a good way to tackle it and hopefully it'll get easier as I work them more and more.
Have you done any hedge laying this year?
Well done you, that's a brilliant job. Going to encourage daughter to grow willow on her farm, such a useful material. Heavens knows how long it'll take them to repair all the recent storm damage.
ReplyDeleteIt's a great tree, but in the right place! Very hard to get rid of otherwise.
DeleteGood advice. 😊
DeleteOur farm probably has a good 40 or 50 kilometers of fencerows so we tend to take one of two approaches, just clean then out completely where no animals will be or to let the natural stuff just continue to grow and get big and leave buffer strips on either side so it doesn't get into the farm equipment. But I think what you are doing is perfect in smaller doses.
ReplyDeleteYeah, a different type of hedge I should imagine as well. What do you have growing in yours? These would have been the barriers in the past, before the wire came along and changed everything.
DeleteFor the most part, the ones we don't keep clean are those planted in Osage Orange trees. It was a tree native to the deep south part of our country that the natives used to make bows from due to it's properties. But at some point in the middle parts of the 20th century, they became the popular thing to create "natural" hedgerows. They have since fallen out of favor and a lot of them are gone these days but we still have a few miles of them remaining. If they weren't extremely tough on chainsaw blades due to their hardness, they probably would all be gone.
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