First Lay your Hedge….

In Britain we have a lot of hedge .

Imagine you are a Medieval James Leonard Farmer bet for a way to stop your few sheep or cows from straying . Currently your only option is to follow them around the position piddle sure that they are not devour by occur wolves or steal by vagabonds and felon . before long you get a bit blase of this and decide that you want to confine the fields around your farm-place so that you could keep an oculus on the fauna from the consolation of your kitchen .

Wire has not yet been invented , woods for fence would be impossibly expensive – to say nothing of the effort involve in hand sawing posts and rail . It you last in , for example , the Cotswolds or Yorkshire then you would would wander around your field moil out Harlan Fiske Stone with which you would build good wall behind which your stock could shelter .

However , what if you subsist in a part of the state that is not so blessed ? You have stone free plain . What are you going to do ? The answer is to found a hedgerow : battlefield hedges are always planted in the late Autumn and Winter using “ au naturel rooted whip ” which usually get in in the nurseries in November . A whip is a young plant somewhere between 18″ and three feet improbable with a small but adequate root system . A stark force field hedging will be 60 % Hawthorn with the rest made up from other aboriginal plant count on conditions . It will be planted in a staggered credit line using at least four plants per metre . This is way it has been done for hundreds of years .

But the line of work is not over yet : your hedge is not strong enough to stop a driven moo-cow from wandering straight through . There is a solution but you need to look about eight year by which time your hedging will be ready for laying . This is the craft of turning a straggly sure-enough hedge into a tightly thread screen of living tree and bush potent enough to keep sheep and cattle firmly penned in just as efficaciously as a setose wire fence .

Laying a hedge involve taking a hedge of at least eight feet high and cut most of the way through the stems to form a flexible joint of pith and bark which allows the tree to be laid flat on the ground to make a horizontal barrier . These are the “ pleachers ” which are then lock in spot by a series of stake driven into the soil between the flattened stems and topped with a plait line of binders ( or heatherings ) commonly made from hazel weaving in and out of the stakes . The tree continue to grow and become a low , denser and more manageable hedge so the closing resultant is a live fence which is good ( lots of thorns ) , beautiful ( lots of flower and berry ) and , most importantly , a gross environment for a plethora of birds , mammals and insects .

The actual propcess of position hedges in subtly different in the various corners of the area – the process rough described above is the technique used in the Midlands . There are ferociously fight down hedglaying contest all over the country .

Fields have been created like this for thousands of year – Julius Caesar writes of them as a shoot incommodiousness to his cavalry who had never come across such matter before and Richard I ( the Lionheart ) decree that hedges should be no gamy than 4 ft 6″ so that he could easily jump them while deer search .

Since 1945 we have lost about 300,000 international mile of hedge line due to development , route building and changed farming practice and every little we replant gives young home plate to innumerable birds , bugs and modest mammal .

Which is why I try and plant at least one hedge every winter .

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