A cracking turn-out with Marcus, Reece, Aaron, Kerrie and myself armed and ready to tackle our hedge challenge. Supplies were plentiful with gingerbread men, fudge and coffee on offer throughout the morning. I don’t think we quite got to the bottom of whether gingerbread ‘men’ is politically correct in this day and age, but much banter surrounded the little people.

We cautiously selected poor and struggling specimens, as we slowly removed the knotted mess that the unmanaged growth had given us.

We still have plenty of trees in the hedgerow and maybe a few more need to become part of the hedge. This will allow the remaining trees to really flourish.

My one concern is that the hedge becomes a bit top-heavy. It might be worth trying to lay a couple of the younger trees to fill in space at the bottom. I will google advice.

But we are where we are, and we have the start of a living hedge. It is a good enough length to allow us to learn how to manage it and encourage horizontal growth, rather than vertical.

On the other side, we created a stacked dead-hedge.

After spending time watching Warwickshire Wildlife Trust coppice and dead-hedge earlier this week, I can see that our dead-hedging is way off the standard. Hopefully, ours will drop a bit and become a bit denser.

However, it is a lot better than what we started with.

We can encourage the already present holly to grow into our hedge and dare I say that there are a fair number of blackthorn and other whips that we could transplant into it.

Well, that’s about it for this week. A nice area to seed with lady’s bedstraw and hedge bedstraw. It will become a lovely spot to watch our hedgerows develop and become populated with wildlife.

The rectangle picnic benches have been moved, so my OCD has calmed down a bit and I feel all is well with our general progress.

We are at bench 2 on Monday next week, clearing scrub and preparing the ground for seeding.

Lovely day, great company and great work.

Paul