Flailing hedges

[Rowden the cowboy]

I was wondering, as we approach hedge cutting season, whether flails have any place on the finer quality hedges? The flails used by farmers on their mixed hedges seem to smash up everything and look pretty awful for a few months but the jagged cuts promote very vigorous re-growth and look alright. What im driving at is how effective flails would be on your more domestic hedges, e.g. laurel, beech, leylandii, thuja, tauxus. Can they give a nice finish, or could they be used to do the bulk of the work and then just touch it up with a hand hedge cutter? It would be nice to be able to drive a tractor up and down a hedge twice and go home rather than spending all day up a ladder trying to get a straight line. Any thoughts?

[Marko]

The reason many field hedges seem to be brutally 'knocked back' at this time of year is that if the land has been put into DEFRA Stewardship scheme then hedges can only be cut every 3 or 5 years. When its time comes around, taking that much growth of in one season is unavoidably unsightly and, no matter how diligent you are at cleaning up, it is a nightmare for cyclists.

 

To my mind a flail cut hedge can look stunning with uniform profiles that could never be achieved by hand and a very fine finish can be achieved on those hedges that are allowed to be cut regularly. All the species you list would be suitable - apart from laurel which doesn't like its leaves damaged at all (hedgecutter or flail). If you have the time and patience, Laurel should be cut with secatuers stem by stem.

[madmatt]

Flail cut hedges are also only as good as the driver of the machine!

[garth mc garth]

i regularly have a tractor and flail on hire due to the large amounts of agri fencing i do, and like has said before the cut is only as good as the operator. we mainly use a 5ft rotary head combined with 30ft of reach make hedges easy work and providing its a nice dense hedge you can make it look as tho its cut by hand. one of my customers has hundred or so acres of orchard and supplies sainsburys with fruit, they have 30ft double rowed leylandi all the way round as windbreaks......those are all machine cut but have the apperance of being cut by hand

[Mark T]

There are a number of different flail types available;

 

# Standard 'farm' flails which can be used to tackle both hedges and ditches / verges.

 

# Hedge only flails which have a sharper flail and are only designed to be used off the floor. Of these you can have rear mounted and forward mounted (giraffe) flails - great as long as the material is't too chunky.

 

# There are a few guys left with circular saw attachments as well, they have to be seen to be believed... think James Bond helicopter attachments.

 

I've been fortunate (?) enough to have operated each type of machine and can tell you that access is the biggest limiting factor. The standard flails do make a mess but as you correctly say, plants do respond well to this type of fracture cut so I see it as a temporary, asthetic problem really.