Almost Ready

After most of another weekend of work, we're almost ready for our bare-root hedging plants to arrive (whenever that is). It's the time of year when, in reality, there's not much time to be outside. By the time we're up, have eaten, and got ourselves sorted, it's normally half-ten, and the light starts to fail by four. That makes a scant five hours available to work, out of which we lose at least some time for lunch.

These things can't be helped.

I used Sigrid to make a first pass at clearing the middle of what I'm going to term 'the boundary clearing' (on the left of the hillside, and which merges, at present, with the neighbouring territory), before we manually cut back the gorse, and pulled up gorse trunks. Over the years (decades, probably), the gorse bushes have straggled out, and many have six foot trunks, lying on the floor (buried by leafmould), with the bush some distance from its rootstock. Fortunately, once you've cut the spiny top, the branch usually pulls up readily enough. We cleared the clearing's left side, making a huge heap of gorse and brambles, yesterday. Today, we tidied up a little, and have marked where we intend to plant some of our hedging plants, in order to create a continuous barrier at that side. At the moment, you can see straight into Ivy Cottage's windows from the clearing, which suits no-one. Once the beech, hazels, plums, and apples are there, and growing, the clearing will feel more sheltered, secluded, and secure.

We're aiming for something that doesn't feel like a hedge, but a more natural boundary. I won't trim the plants into a squared-off shape, and they're not in a straight line. Once they're established, I'd quite like to grow some roses, and some ivy, through them, for flowers, winter foliage, and wildlife (ivy's a fantastic late-season food for pollinators).

Until then, there are just little cairns of stones, marking each of forty-six spots, running down to the corner where the fence ends. It takes in a number of small trees that are established (hawthorns and blackthorns), and skirts a holly tree. At the moment, you can enter the clearing from the orchard at that end, but eventually, once we've cleared more blackthorn, the entrance will be further along, about a third of the way along the back boundary, where you'll go through an arch of plums, and either left to this clearing, or right into the other.

Once we'd placed these, we used the last hour of light to go back to that other clearing (the birch clearing), and keep cutting back the gorse there. We're done, now, with manual cutting, and I need to go back with Sigrid to clear the brambles and bracken. The structure of the clearing is now clear, and we'll be planting a short run of the same hedge mix at the back of it, to delineate the clearing, and give it some boundary. There'll be a 'gate' above the birches, up the hillside through the heather, or a passage leading left into a cluster of trees, and then on into the boundary clearing.