Another Hedge. Oak Dorkings between Pickering to Stape road

 

12 ft tall and cut off at that hight for several years.  Lots of cutting the individual hawthorn stems apart.

And the finished job:-  (2023)

First Hedge laying of 2013

1st of September - start of Countryside Stewardship rules for hedge laying, saw me eagerly cutting & laying my first hedge of the season at Low Askew near Cropton.  "Lovely", I thought as I'm often doing this in the freezing wet of darkest winter.  But it was too warm at around 18c and in just a T-shirt I was getting rather too many thorns in my arms for my liking.  The owner didn't want me to remove the fencing, which made me a little apprehensive as I didn't think I'd have enough  room  to work.  But it turned out I had plenty of room and as I only had two small corridors either side of the mixed species hedge to work in I didn't keep loosing my tools as often happens.  An added pleasure were the several buzzards flying around.

 Same location, different hedge.

A length of hedge following laying.

The same hedge one year later on.

Early summer growth one year on.

Regrowth from a newly laid hedge (Low Askew)








(Below).  This is how narrow a Yorkshire style hedge should be laid.

Yorkishire style!  Narrow!!

Extreme Hedgelaying

 The hedge I'd been laying now covered in a foot or so of snow.  But I wasn't going to give up.

 Back to the car for the shovel.

A little bit of digging and we're able to start.  But then I got sensible and went home.

Laying a large hedge

Almost any size hedge can be cut and laid. This particular one is alongside a disused railway track and was probably planted around 1860. This was the first time it had been laid, some of the trunks were nearly 1ft across and had grown to around 20ft in hight.




Stage 1 Cut away all the brash around the sides so you can start cutting everything that is growning out to the sides.














Stage 2. Cut all the large stems off as far up as you can reach.










Stage 3. Now go and look at what's left. Remove all the large stems provided you have enough other material to lay.













Stage 4. Now lay what is left as normal. Most of this is chainsaw and large axe work. Even a large hedge can be laid to the narrow style that is common in Yorkshire hedge laying.

And this is the regrowth around three years later.

This hedge was laid in periods when the overnight temperature (Sinnington Manor) was as low as -16c.

I have heard and read that large hedges don't regrow as well as younger hedges and that low temperatures can kill off the laid stems.  This doesn't appear to have happened here.