On a mission

The past few days have been exhausting, and, as a consequence, any downtime has been spent slumped on the sofa rather than making entries in The Journal.

Let me explain.  The cottage has about three hundred yards of hedging. This is not your suburban, domestic 4' high privet or laurel hedging. This is your agricultural, 6' high, 6' wide, hawthorn and bramble, a cow aint getting through that hedging. It is thick. It is nasty and it is time to cut it back.

Most farmers use a tractor and flail hedge cutter to keep their field boundaries in order. Unfortunately access issues prevent their use at the cottage, so I need to resort to loppers and a variety of chainsaws and hedge cutters. 

To make matters worse, I was unable to cut the hedges last year due to my bad back and the farmer, whose land borders the cottage, didn't cut his side of them either. As a result the 6' high hedges now sport vigorous shoots reaching 14' skyward. 

It is going to be a bastard of a job and, with a fine spell of weather forecast, it is time to make a start.

Thursday, 3rd October. 2024

This morning started with a trip to the Vets as Whiffler was due his inoculations. Since we were out and about, we decided to head over to The Valley in Evesham and pick up a few terracotta pots. These will be needed for the tulip and dwarf iris bulbs that we picked up at the RHS Autumn Show last Sunday. 

We were home by lunchtime and, after eating, I headed out to make a start on the hedges. I decided to ease myself in to the task and started on the short length that borders the back lawn and the orchard.  This hedge had been laid a couple of years ago, so it was in good shape and needed little more than a good cut. Having said that, there was still four or five feet of growth that needed to be taken out of the top of it and the wild rose at one end was vicious.

After an hour or so I stood back and surveyed my effort and was reasonably pleased. It was now time to start on the hedges that border the property. These are monsters. I decided to make a start on the one that borders the neighbouring pasture, as this currently throws a lot of shade on the greenhouses and the veg patch.

First I used my electric hedge cutter to take back the growth on our side of the hedge. Then I grabbed a short ladder and set it against the hedge. It was now slow progress using loppers to take out the 8' high shoots of Ash, Hawthorn and Elder* as these are far too big for a hedge cutter. After clearing the larger shoots, I was finely able to use my petrol long-reach hedge cutter to level out the top of the hedge.

It was slow progress and I estimate that I can complete about five yards of hedging in an hour. At the end of day #1, I reckon that I had cut about forty or fifty yards of hedging and poor 30% had created a mountain of brash up in the orchard.

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* That is 8' above the top of the hedge. These shoots are a couple of inches in diameter at the point I was cutting them!

Friday, 4th October, 2024

It was hedging all day today. I continued the hedge bordering the pasture downslope of the cottage. This is probably close to fifty years in length and gets challenging, as twenty yards of the hedge runs behind the outbuildings. It has almost completely filled the 6' gap between the hedge and the back of the building, so clearing the overgrowth was tricky in such a confined space.

It took all day to clear about thirty yards of hedging* and my hands have been cut to ribbons by thorns, despite stout leather gloves and equipment that does its best to distance the user from the hedge.

I just hope that the farmer gets his contractor to cut the hedges in the pasture, as the ragged edge on his side really messes with the completer/finisher in me!

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* This 30 yards included the ten or fifteen yards of copper beech hedging that forms a break between the front and rear gardens. The beech hedging was an absolute breeze to cut in comparison to the thorn filled. field hedging.

Saturday, 5th October, 2024

This morning saw me, bright and early, down at the local surgery for my flu and covid inoculations. As I wandered back to the car I realised that my left arm was going to be really sore later on, from both the injections and a day of hedge cutting.

I guess I managed about four or five hours on the hedges before I decided that I needed a change. I dragged the lawn mower out of the shed and spent a few hours tidying up the lawns around the house.  Mowing seemed like a positive picnic after the slog of the past three days.

Sunday, 6tth October, 2024

Guess what? Yep, another day working on the hedges. I finally finished the stretch behind the outbuildings and 30% has had the genius idea of hiring an industrial shredder to convert the cuttings in to mulch for use on the garden. We have used one previously, when we lived at The Pile, and they are absolutely brilliant tools.

We also had some potentially good news from our neighbouring farmer. 30% received a text message advising that his hedge cutting contractor will hopefully be attending to the hedges around the cottage in the near future.

I bloody hope so, because that will reduce my work by a massive amount.