Unwired

Over the last few weekends -- say 20 hours work total -- I've laid over the first hedge I planted here -- about 50 yards of "native mix" with the hazel taken out and used elsewhere. It's gone well. I'll never be fast at that job -- I enjoy the looking much too well -- but it's a real eye opener to see how much easier it all goes when you don't have to spend time de-wiring. And it's interesting to see what other planting-time lessons there are to learn.

• Rabbit guards are a must. The plants mostly survived, but I reckon they're a year or so back, and the ground-level damage makes them harder to split and bend over.
• Ignore the supplier's sincere advice to plant these bare-rooted slips in a trench of tilled soil. Even six years on, the roots move when you strain the plants around the spiles. Slide them into the clay down the back of a spade and they'll be forced to set firm roots in the clay.
• Another piece of gardening advice to avoid is to take the top of the slip off so that they bush out. A bush is useless -- you have to strip it all off when you lay. What you want is tall, spindly whips, so just leave them be.
• Never plant blackthorn. Duh.
• Don't plant briars with the rest of the hedge. Until it's laid over they just get in the way.
• So the mix, if you don't fancy just hawthorn, would be five hawthorn, one spindle, one hazel and one fruiting tree depending on your taste -- mine would be beech. Then come back when you've laid it and put a dog briar in each of the gaps.

Convenience

I'll be hedgelaying along the road again this year, so appearance matters a little more. And at the same time I've pretty much run out of all the odd offcuts I've been using to hold it all together. Privet was good -- it grows into hard straight rods -- but it's all gone now.

I've asked all over but asking for "posts for hedgelaying" draws a blank -- you get offered fencing pales at eighteen shillings each. It's overkill and at two per yard it runs into expense.

It doesn't look like I'll ever find the canonical Hazel rods, so I'm falling back on plan B. I rang up one of the woodsmen in the Wealden Advertiser -- Brede Valley Fencing -- and asked him to make me the same pales used for cleft chestnut wire fencing, but five foot long and without the wire. He quoted me five shillings each and I bought four hundred which will keep me going for a while. They filled up the back of the Galaxy and I drove cautiously home, delighted by the smell of the fresh green wood.

Here they are in the shed. It's a weight off my mind. I feel I can set to work without worrying about running out.

Benders? No need -- I've got Willow wands coming out of my ears, and that certainly gets attention on the commuter train.

Extreme Hedging Porn

This is the butt end of a willow post. Now I do know that willow roots if you put it in the ground, but I needed a post and this one had a handy crook to hold down the benders. I figured it would be all right because it was going in upside down. There is no way at all that a cutting -- even willow -- could ever root successfully with its vascular arrangement the wrong way up. 

One year on, you can see the crook -- three foot from the ground -- is fresh and green and sprouting new shoots.

Two Observations

1. A sad little entry for change control at the meeting last week: ZWD the Zimbabwe dollar is now so close to worthless that the calculations overflow. Remove from the forex universe. No impact expected.
2. The may is at its peak. The madder thorns are now iced with a continuous white crust. As quickly as it came it'll be gone....

Lust for Life in the Hedgerow

The willow benders I wove along the top of the lay are flowering in one last effort. They'll die as the wands dry out.

And Mrs U found a fine toad -- moist and warm -- waiting for insects to attack the lambs lettuce in the greenhouse.

Advice

I was cutting down the hedge in front of the house today. Quite heavy work, a little sawing through the beech trunks, but mostly figuring out how to use the loppers to undo the tangle and pull out the heavy brushings.

Every Sunday walker that came along the lane had the same piece of advice: "That's a heavy job -- you need a chainsaw."

Now I'm a power tool enthusiast -- in the right place -- and I know a professional hedger would automatically use a power saw. But why on earth would anyone imagine that a middle-aged, middle-grade bank operative with almost no training or experience would do better with a chainsaw than with the bowsaws I've been using since I was a child?

Pain Allergy

I didn't do any hedging today. Last Sunday I was tidying up a monster hawthorn stool and a branch whacked me in the head, leaving me with a dirty great big thorn stuck in my scalp.

It didn't infect, but my inability to remove it -- I couldn't see it -- resulted in a sequence of increasingly desperate requests for help as the lump went down and the splinter made itself increasingly uncomfortable. It ended in the Barts Minor Injuries unit with a nurse on each side of the couch each pressing hard on her side of the lump while one of them used a free hand to wield the forceps.

Some people would pay for that, but for me, before I go back, I'm getting one of these. In the mean time, I had a happy day trying out my new compressor.

Happy Christmas

This hedging porn looks a bit Christmassy so it seems appropriate. Both taken on the solstice, truly just an hour before the thaw turned the rime to drips.

The hedge is my current work in progress -- you might just see I've reached the limt of my dewiring, and as the ground is too hard for stakes, I spent the time peeling back the stockfence and tidying up.

If you think the stakes look a bit dodgy, you're right. I salvaged them out of some chesnut paling lattice. Years old, but still hard enough to drive with a hammer, once I've opened up the ground with the iron. Almost any stake makes the job much easier.

The second picture looks very frigid indeed, but that's what happens if you go outside with the white balance set to flourescent...

Blind for Forty Years

I never noticed this before: The flowers on an oak tree are pretty bundles of loose catkins about an inch long. I checked with Mrs. U: she hadn't noticed either. But all the oaks we've checked are covered with them.

Trees from Whips

The last thing I did before I was locked up was plant some fresh ash whips. I smeared off the lower buds, stuck them eight or ten inches in, wrapped rabbit guards round, and bundled in threes in the hope that one will grow. I've tried hazel in some hedges and they look like they're going to break out, so we'll see.

Busy Weekend

OK. I finished pollarding the old willows by the pond. The take from that is going to be a lot of crappy firewood and a lot of waste, unless I can make faggots. The sanest use for the land we have would be to grow enough willow or poplar to fire a woodchip boiler -- as we burn oil at the moment that's twelve or sixteen hundred savings from something that currently yields nothing.

The big winds last week blew out some of my dodgier hedgelaying, so I've put that back. And I've planted another twenty-five hazels on a rather tight spacing. When they're established I'm putting in ash behind them with a view to eventual firewood coppice.

And I put in seventy-five hornbeams for Mrs U's garden.

Just one magic point: if you've struggled as I have to put bare-root trees into heavy clay you need this spade or one like it. If you want to let the plants in down the back of the spade in the traditional way, and you're strong enough to open up the slits in the soil, the metal shaft means you can push as hard as you need without breaking the handle off, and if you do decide to dig a trench, it needn't be a wide one. You'll need metal re-inforced boots to use it though -- and be prepared to jump on it to get it in to clay.

Hedging Strategies

This weekend, I have been mostly de-wiring.

The mad woman who lived here before us handled the increasing gappiness of the hedges by stapling stock fence on to the more solid stalks. Over time, the bark and wood grows over and through the wire, and new shoots tangle up in it. It becomes absolutely impossible to manage in the normal way: you can't lay the stalks over because they're tangled up in the wire, and you can't use the saw because it'll be blunted on wire or staple.

The only way out is to remove it and this is what I have been doing. You need to cut away the grown-through stalks (a terrible waste because they're the ones that would be easy and productive to lay) and lever out every staple and length of embedded wire.

I could have salvaged some of the stalks by cutting them out of the wire, but unfortunately the wire netting was in such good shape that my tightfistedness took over and I was determined to get it out intact. Which I did and in the process finally discovered how to use the staple remover on the fencing pliers. Instead of ineffectual whacking with the pliers in the hope of getting the hook under the staple, you position it carefully, and then smack the striking face of the pliers with a 3lb hammer. The hook leaps under the wire and you can lever the whole thing out.

Anyway, I've done a good old length, and while my arms are scratched up to buggery, I've salvaged some posts to weave into the lay, I'll be able to buy some chestnut pales to do the rest, and I can start laying next weekend. And I have the wire I'll need to keep the neigbour's horses from browsing on the new growth. (Why do horses prefer thorn bushes to lush grass? FIIK.)

Commuter

Coming home yesterday evening I watched in the twilight as the mist off the river poured through gaps in the grown-out hedge and evaporated in the warm meadow. But now heading back the other way, everything is cool and there is a deep silvery blanket shining in the bright moonlight.