Hedging our bets
If you’re going to clear a site of plant life (even a site as bereft of wildlife as ours) then you’ll want to be re-planting to provide the right habitat to encourage in all our furry/feathered/freaky little friends.
We’ve deliberately cut the canopy down to about one metre in winter so no birds are tempted to nest in the trees and halt works for the summer, and now it’s time to plant-up a new hedge to give cover to anything that might be living on the land and want ‘out’ whilst we work. Our new hedge is to provide a ‘green corridor’ all down one side of the site and connect up two existing hedges – to this end we’ve ordered up a native mix being mainly hawthorn but with other species such as hazel, field maple and gelder rose mixed in – with bare-root plants due to arrive any minute it’s time to get digging!
Sooo…. here we are, it’s late winter, the soil is 100% clay and we’ve got to prepare a planting strip 50m long, ready for our little hedge plants. A few days of back-breaking digging and a ton of horse manure from Lynne’s cousin Cheryl and we’re all set – not perfect maybe but we’re optimistic for our newly arrived bare-root sticks. Add a couple more days of thoughtful plant arrangement and planting-up and we have a baby hedgerow! Now to wait and nurture and hopefully in a couple of years we’ll be looking at a proper hedge and the wildlife will be looking at somewhere to call ‘home’.
