Tuesday 20 January 2015

Trees, trees and more trees

Hmmm...

I need 65 trees to replace the ones that have died in my plantation (a loss rate of about 4% which is OK), and I had 10 left over tubes for planting new ones. That's a total of 75 trees, I also owed my wife a tree for our anniversary.

However, partly because of minimum order quantities and partly because of lack of stock elsewhere, I've now ordered today:

50 x sweet chestnut, castanea sativa (I wanted these in my initial order but they were out of stock - great for coppicing and hopefully nut producing, although with chestnut blight that might not come to fruition)
25 x wild pear, pyrus communis (good on wet soil, which mine certainly is - pretty blossom and the fruit might be good for feeding pigs)
10 x common dogwood, cornus sanguinea (pretty red stems, for weaving)
25 x black locust, robinia pseudoacacia (excited about this one - it has amazing scented blossom, grows very quickly, coppices well, makes excellent firewood and is very rot resistant - not a native species, however, but with the climate changing as it is, I don't think that's such a bad thing. I only wanted 10 but there was a minimum order quantity - it's thorny so I was going to plant it around the outside but may relent and put a few standards in)
25 x black maul, salix triandra (the classic weaving willow, also known as almond willow)
1 x black mulberry, morus nigra (anniversary present - to go in our orchard. Will hopefully produce some edible fruits)
1 x almond, prunus dulcis (a present for me! Don't know if it will produce nuts in this country but I can but try!)

That's 137 trees that I have to plant... now I have to decide which get the tubes and which only get spirals (of which I have hundreds!). A less daunting task than before, especially as most of the tubes/stakes are already in position and don't need lugging up hill. Planting spirals is less time consuming too so I should be done in a couple of days, weather permitting. The latter two are larger, pot grown plants.

The plan is to get some old carpet from a local company (who are only too glad to get rid of it) so I can mulch each new planting. I'm hoping I can cover the carpet with woodchip as I have a few tonnes which will make it more visually appealing, but I'm sure the weeds will grow up pretty quickly anyway.

Saturday 10 January 2015

Tidying the hedge

One of the hawthorn hedges I'd planted was looking pretty messy:

Before

Although the whips had mostly grown well, the grass was growing out of the spirals and impeding them. A few hours work and many barrows of woodchip later and I think you'll agree, it looks much tidier:

 

After

It's getting a bit late as of time of writing to trim them - I think I'll let them grow for another year and then cut them back to encourage bushier growth at the bottom. If I understand correctly, the trimmings can be pushed into the ground as a "quickset" hedge to thicken things up even more.

 

Wednesday 7 January 2015

Confused...

Wondering around my trees today I noticed a few that I didn't recognise. After some discussion with the good people at Arbtalk, they have been identified as downy birch, betula pubescens or silver birch, betula pendula. I didn't order any birch (because there are enough self seeding and it rots so quickly it has limited value for me) so there must have been a mix up at the nursery! As you can see, some are in tubes and some are in spirals, so it's not just one species that has been muddled up: