Cobrans Farm 17th November 2012

The second session at Cobrans Farm was completed in dry weather but the ground was saturated and soon became very muddy indeed. Working with one trainee I laid ten yards of maiden hedge, producing a very satisfying result as these before and after shots show.

Technical laying

Some rather technical laying yesterday with the Surrey Hedgelaying Group. A difficult hedge at Tatsfield that was made up of widely spaced old Hawthorn stems with some more recent mixed species under-planting. A lot of back-laying was required and in some cases the stem was split both ways. Below is a rather poor quality photo of a root lay. The large stem has been dug around and then pleached from the far side so that only one root remained attached and then laid over on this. In the photo the pleached root runs downwards from the centre of the picture.

 Another problem was a large multi-branched Hawthorne that had been cut off at about three feet high some time in the past and rot had penetrated down the centre of the stem. it was not possible to lay this conventionally as it had two large buttresses on the side to be bent over with the rotten section in the middle. So we cut vertically down the stem, leaving two buttresses attached and as these led to a nice roots, we laid on these, removing the entire centre section of the stem. This gave us two stems both with vigorous top growth - centre right in the photo below.