More hedgetalk

[AHPP]

29 minutes ago, Peewit said:

beaten to death with tractor flails

How should farm hedges be cut? Should they be cut even?

Edited March 1 by AHPP

[Peewit]

19 minutes ago, AHPP said:

How should farm hedges be cut? Should they be cut even?

Ideally they should be laid. And unlaid hedge isn't a hedge. It's a line of trees. You can't bully a woodland tree that wants to grow as such into being a low-growing shrub with machinery. Laying arrests the growth of the leader, causes a new one to sprout and while that's growing encourages the growth of laterals that provide the leaf cover and the structure of the hedge. A laid hedge needs no trimming until the top growth flops sideways making the top wider than the base. Then you lightly chamfer the sides to maintain a hedge with a wide base that norrows to the top. Never flat-top a hedge by running a flail along it horizontally. 

Laid hedges produce new leaders at the heal cut. Those need to grow out. When they mature it's time to lay the hedge again. Flat-topping destroys those leaders. The trees spend most of their growing season repairing the trauma of flailing, leaf cover steadily diminishes, the bottom of the hedge becomes bare and gets colonised by weeds and brambles and eventually the original hedge dies and all you're left with is a line of scrub. 

 

One of the biggest battles I have is trying to convince farmers and landowners that hedges don't need to be cut into neat straight lines and unnatural geometric square shapes. It won't make them thicker, it will destroy them. Hedges follow a life cycle. If you want something that is square and stays exactly 6 foot tall forever, build a wall. A hedge needs to be laid, maintained correctly and allowed to grow out, then laid again. That means they will get tall, they will be shaggy and tousled and once laid it's an on-going cycle, not a one-off operation. NE don't understand that last bit.

[markieg31]

In my tenancy agreement it had a clause about flailing hedges every three years on rotation.  I had to pull them up on it before the agreement was signed. 

 

Obviously they had written the agreement thinking people want to flail them hedges every year. Where I was planning on letting them grow and then laying them. Some of the hedges are well over stood with several fences grown in and intertwined. Tis some job to try and make something of them. In some cases it is a case of cutting out and then looking forward to the next cycle to have something decent to lay. Round here they go mad on the casting/ banking up, some of the banks are getting up to 10ft tall, where does it stop?

[AHPP]

4 hours ago, Peewit said:

Laid hedges produce new leaders at the heal cut. Those need to grow out. When they mature it's time to lay the hedge again.

How does one decide when they’re mature enough that it needs re-laying?

 

This is mega useful btw. 

[Peewit]

I don't miss ditch and bank hedges, especially where they've dug out and cast up pedantically and you end up needing a ladder to get to the hedge. 

Where I am now, on sedgy moorland ground there are often drainage channel down one side of a hedge. I don't notice it in October. Come back after Christmas in a wet winter like we've had this year and the water can be two feet deep and four feet wide. Always on the side you need to work of course...

 

They also like to flail the hedges before I start work which is a pita as you've no green growth to work with. However overstood and rough they are I prefer to thin out myself so I can choose what to use.

 

On grant funded work land agents have a habit of ringing me to come and look at hedges, ear-marked for laying in the up-coming season, in the middle of June. Other than species ID-ing you can see nthing of the hedge because it's just a solid wall of nettles and cow parsley. I'm just about getting them house trained so they get their ducks in a row so I can look at next years hedges at end of March when I can actually see what I'll be laying.

[Peewit]

42 minutes ago, AHPP said:

How does one decide when they’re mature enough that it needs re-laying?

 

This is mega useful btw. 

Check the size of the new leaders that have grown (and hopefully been left to grow unmolested) from your heal cuts. When those new leaders have out-stripped the lateral growth and stand proud above them it's getting close to re-laying time. Eventually, when the new leaders become vigorous enough the plant will transfer all it's energy to them to create a new tree and your old pleacher will start to die. You'll see that leaf growth on the old pleacher and its laterals becomes sparse and the main stem of the old pleacher is starting to look old, a bit sick and moss-covered. That's definitely re-laying time. Cut out you old pleachers and discard them and lay the fresh new leader just like you did at the start with the virgin hedge. In theory you can follow the rhythm of this growth cycle indefinitely and the hedge will survive for centuries. Eventually all old root stocks die - no tree lives forever - but by the time that happens it will have seeded countless new saplings, birds will have sown new species and the hedge should be self-sustaining and self-replicating.   

 

Sometimes, depending on local growing conditions, the new leader will be plenty big and robust enough to lay before the old pleacher has started to fade. In which case re-lay before your new generation of hedge becomes over-stood. But you should still cut the old pleacher out, not just lay the new leader down on top of it, because it will either die eventually anyway and then you're just building in a lot of future dead wood and holes into you hedge; or with some species the old pleacher and the new leader laid on top of it will continue to grow together and old will rob the new of vigour.  

Edited March 1 by Peewit

[markieg31]

Interesting reading and very informative.