Over 500 Trees Planted!

I'm so pleased with the last week - we have a new fence and hedge in! Woop! 

We did this years ago with the first field nearest the house, to separate off the footpath from the field and make things more private. We kept thinking about doing this with the second field as well, but it was during lockdown and seeing how few people kept their dogs on leads and could control them that made us decide that this was the right thing to do. 

time kept slipping on this year though and it kept being really wet. I had planned to put the fence up, with the help of my dad and the post knocker, but with it getting close to spring and a lot of trees that needed to go into the ground it was time to just bite the bullet and get the professionals in. My friends Alex and Chris (along with Jamie) came with all the right gear and experience and got the two runs of 100m and a pair of gates hung in a day! They've done such a tidy job of it I can't help but smile when I look at it. 

A lot of trees to plant

I didn't do much other than keep them fed and hopefully happy. They worked well all day and it was great to see it up. The field already seems so much more private now. 

That just left me a lot of trees to plant!

Part of my idea for this hedge is to copy what the farmers used to do around where I grew up. I grew up near Tenbury Wells and there so many hedges would have damson trees dotted amongst them. Last summer I had found a supplier would had dmasons on an old fashioned rootstock, a Brompton, that would mean the trees would grow up above the hedge line. 

These were the trees I planted first. I spaced them 7m apart. 12 trees in total and of 9 different varieties, most damsons but some bullaces and one plum.  

Once these were in I marked 1m spacings and selected randomly 5 hedging plants from a choice of hawthorn, blackthorn, hornbeam, hazel and spindle and started to plant them. 

It seemed daunting at first but the actual tree planting wasn't too bad, it was the fitting of the tree guards that nearly killed me!

 But by the end of Saturday 500 or so trees were planted, staked and protected! Just hope they establish well now! 

I'm really looking forward to how this grows over the next few years and how fruitful it will be!