28th November - Hedging Again

Brash fire rekindling in the darkness

Naturally I need only mention in my virtual scribblings that the weather is mild and we receive our first heavy frost of winter. The cold was sufficient to freeze the outside tap and to see the fields powdery white filled me with a strange delight. I suppose like everyone I like the season to feel like the season.

There was no real time to admire the beautiful morning (a sad confession to make). C arrived at daybreak and there followed a mad rush to do the animals, make lunch and gather tools. At the rather late time of 8:30 AM having made our way through a good but very generous bowl full of porridge each (I told you Em likes to keep people well fed) we were on our way. Next stop was to collect stakes and binders from Square Wood and having lashed them roughly to the trailer it was on to Peasmarsh to start hedge laying. The job in Peasmarsh is an ongoing affair, this being the third year I've been back and C's second. In some ways it is rewarding to see how the laid hedges have progressed year-on-year, but equally it can prove frustrating when they have not been properly trimmed or managed to promote thick growth - which after all is rather the point of having them laid. In this case no attempt whatsoever has been made to inhibit the vertical growth and soon the mixed hedges will be as tall and straggly as they were when I first arrived.

There's always something unsettling about starting a new job and anxiety, however unfounded, lingers all the same. The beauty of returning to familiar ground is that there is none of that and within half an hour of arriving the sound of two chainsaws rang out across the steep sided valley. Unlike the hedge at Rolvenden, today's hedge was a far more straightforward beast.  Despite being heavily stocked with hawthorn, the plants are only six or seven years old, all double planted through membrane. In such circumstances a rhythm can be found and good progress is possible.  Of course I am the limiting factor in how much hedge we lay (and therefore money we earn) in a day and although C can't actually wield the chainsaw for me he does a brilliant job of doing everything else. By working extremely hard he trimmed the sides, staked and bound, trimmed up and even burned the brash, allowing me to plod slowly along the headline cutting and laying, cutting and laying. As a result we walked away at the end of the day with 40 m of completed hedge behind us dimly lit by a huge mound of brash rekindling in the darkness.

Dinner

Italian style duck soup. Em combined the duck stock from last night's carcass with passata, carrots, Cavolo Nero, parasol mushrooms, a little chilly, broken spaghetti and roast duck to make a wonderful all in one soup -we ate gallons.