I’ve spent a couple of days helping lay a hedge on a neighbour’s farm over the last fortnight which has been good if extremely cold. It’s an excellent example of the benefits of the environmental grant schemes that have been and are still available to farmers. This hedge was planted along with a couple of small […]
I seem to remember that it’s a combination of reducing temperature and day-length that prompts deciduous trees to begin the process of leaf shedding. I am once again impressed with the precision of timing involved; after all trees don’t just dump their leaves – that would be too easy. Rather, it’s an active process. Lots of useful material […]
I delivered some beef to a customer a couple of days ago, for whom I did some work earlier in the year. It was lovely to see her again and great to see the willow fence we built and to hear how pleased she is with it. As predicted when we discussed the project in July 2011, […]
In the hands of an amateur, a tractor mounted flail can be bad news for a hedge. There’s still evidence of hedge crime to be found without looking too hard. But you’ve got to consider a bit of hedge history and take a look at what these things can do when in the right hands […]
Taking money, as we do, from the EU through the Countryside Stewardship Scheme, sometimes bothers me. Partly that’s due to a bit of guilt in taking public money for what could be seen as private gain and partly because it’s got to be better not to be so reliant on a grant that inevitably will end at some point. However, […]
After a great deal of frustration over the last two weeks, with a chainsaw that wouldn’t start, I finally got going with the last piece of hedge coppicing in our Countryside Stewardship Scheme, this morning. We cracked on despite a stiff breeze. At least the wind was coming from the west and would in theory […]
Despite some pretty nasty weather, Gravenhurst’s P3 group turned out (with a couple of special guests) last weekend, to attack a fourth section of one of our old thorn, boundary hedges. It’s a pretty spiteful hedge – some old, gnarly stems of hawthorn, Crataegus monogyna and belicose blackthorn, Prunus spinosa, fighting with a storm of spikes […]