No Sally you're right, although we work to 3 years. However our hedges are now nice and bushy so we keep the tops down every year. If you cut the hedges too intensely then you get no berries or fruit that summer, so we might go back to every 2nd year. We have loads of birds nesting in our hedges, and others catching them for their dinner - just watched a sparrow hawk taking her final meal of the day, backlit by a beautiful sunset
We have various trees studded along the hedges, so although they are still young, birds which like to perch high to sing, or look for ground dwelling snacks, have somewhere to do so.
I'm not sure SS just how long our hedges add up to. Ah, the man himself just walked in. He thinks about half a mile, and there's another couple of hundred metres still to plant. There is also about a 200m x 4m wide 'wildlife strip' which is fairly densely packed with trees and shrubs, and two coppices, one left very much to itself, and the other destined for regular coppicing and harvesting for firewood. We love our trees
. There were two trees when we moved here 23 years ago; the first blew down in our first Autumn gales, although it has now regenerated, and the other has to be kept pollarded because of power lines. We are proud of the work we've done, but you can see why we had to invest in a hedgecutter (not a flail) for our Siromer. Every hedge has two sides and a top, so loads of work, but worth it.
Topic: Natural hedge growth along fence line? (Read 5594 times)
