Beautiful sunny day, even warm outside. Again we spent the whole day out there, including having our lunch. So nice to dry washing outside again too.
Today we tackled yet more of the hedging. The hedges around our fields, an in particular the one that is entirely ours, not bound by neighbours, have been badly neglected. The trees allowed to grow tall, as as they were previously coppiced, this means now a tall mess of entangled trunks. They shaded out the other plants, killing off them off, and on top of that, the previous owner’s horse barged its way into the hedge to eat what is left of it. Leaving us with.. well, lots of gaps. Devon hedges are constructed with large banks of earth and stone, but most of this is gone, leaving the old stools high above the ground level.
It is a little bit of a hopeless job trying to get it back to full hedge. But we are willing to try. We have already fenced the hedges against our sheep, and that’s a good start. Fortunately there are many self sown seedlings of hazel, oak, hawthorn and elder in the gaps, so with some encouragement and protection, with luck the gaps will fill in again. They say you should only work on 1/10th of your hedges in any year, to give the wildlife depending on it a chance. That’s handy, as we are working with hand tools only; bow saws and bill hook, its very slow, and this winter we have only managed to tackle about 20 ft. We have coppiced where the width of the stems is too much to laying; hopefully new growth will arrive and we can lay that another year. The rest was laid, and the twiggy branches from coppicing thrown into gaps to fill. Its looking a lot more hedge like now. It will take years to get it back to a proper hedge.
