Thrilled to see work starting along the lane, preparing for hedge planting. And autumn the time to do it. Two young guys busy with strimmers clearing herbage ready to receive the whips. The line they are patiently planting by hand makes its way wherever there’s room. Along drainage ditches in some places, banks in other, utilising the space between fence and tarmac on the single track roadway. Laybys are left open due to lack of space. I stop and chat to them. They tell me it’s a 75% hawthorn mix with  crab, blackthorn, hazel etc making up the rest. Order books are full and they’re working all over to meet demand from farmers and landowners taking advantage of current grants available.

Our farming  neighbour pays upfront and will eventually get his grant money from the ministry. In the yard when I’m up at Southridge on other business I stop to congratulate him. His biggest fear is that winter’s snow and compacted ice cleared from the road piling up on the infant trees in these first few years will destroy them. Given the alterations in weather patterns caused by climate change I think that’s less likely to happen, though excessive flooding might affect the ones in the ditch. The plants are from good stock, double spaced, warmed and protected from the elements and weed choke by their plastic guards and canes. We will be following their progress with keen interest, especially those planted by the fencing opposite us here on the corner.

Our friend the groundsman and his team turned up this week and were working for hours. The high sheltering hawthorn hedge on the east end boundary wall got its bi-annual trim. Still plenty of room left for nesting birds next spring. In our field his two friendly young employees strim the rampant soft rush and reeds all the  way back to the crags and beyond down the slope. What a difference it makes to our immediate view, opening up the ground and somehow lifting the land by restoring the primacy of grass, however rough the grazing. 

Best of all the boss, in a mini-digger hired for the purpose, skilfully tackles our big overgrown bonfire. He neatly separates and clears the wood and herbage, creating a pit in the process into which he packs the bulk of matter. He warns we’ll have even more stingers next year as a result, their seeds now well spread. Finally using the last of our store of diesel (safer to handle than petrol) he fires the remaining combustible material. A haunting sensation to have woodsmoke billow and merge with the deadening mist as a late sun starts to assert itself.

Our contractor is a big lad but a gentle one, with a keen eye for wildlife, and we always swop stories of encounters with the natural world. Three times while wielding the bucket he spies toads in the spill. Stopping work, he gathers them up to release by the  garden ponds. He’s tickled by my the story of the hare who I suspected gave birth to her leverets in the wild protective mess of the pile and my later encounter with them at dusk. (See ‘Hare Raising’ / July 14th 2024)

Our wonderful cheerful handyman and friend was also here a couple of weeks ago. He did a very neat job designing and building two adjoining wooden compost bins to replace the handsome but clapped out beehive style ones. Next to them a big black plastic bag receives the tons of leaves I’ve been raking up. The resulting leaf mould will make for good humus when mixed into the raised beds in the vegetable garden next year.

The ancient but effective petrol driven scarifier gives me a good workout as I trundle it round the grassed areas of the garden accumulating moss and leaves, which then get added to the compost. Gave the lower quadrant of the meadow a particularly thorough going over, this way and that.  Later I’ll work up those mini-patches of exposed earth where the molehills once were to sow a mix of yellow rattle and red bartsia – meadow plants that grow semi-parasitically on grass – in hope of making ingress against the couch which still predominate in that patch.  

Lest we forget….Post boxes around the country have been scene set in recent years with an increasing range of imaginative tableaux. Here’s the latest from the big village.