Trees
When I was still in the Year Zero stage of allotment planning last summer, I was going to coppice both the ash and the cherry trees. Sometime over the winter, the ash tree got a reprieve, and can stay uncoppiced for the time being. The cherry trees have been pollarded, and I was planning to coppice them. I can't remember why, now, except maybe I was imagining them getting out of control again, with their fruit 20ft in the air, food for only the wood pigeons.
But that's just daft. There's nothing to stop me managing them properly so that the new growth is never longer than, say, 3ft, never out of reach from the ground. The hedge can grow in around them. Once it's established, I could maybe coppice one of the 5 cherry tree trunks per year, or every other year, see how that goes? And I'll have cherries, the while.
Frankly, the main problem was an aesthetic one. The tops of the pollards are really ugly, unevenly cut, dead old stumps and new stumps and broken bits, and God knows what else. I just need to tidy them up with the saw, new shoots will grow, and nowt's-a-matter, as they used to say in Sunderland.
Management, that's the whole new concept I'm learning, about trees and shrubs on an allotment: The Hedge, forsooth.
But that's just daft. There's nothing to stop me managing them properly so that the new growth is never longer than, say, 3ft, never out of reach from the ground. The hedge can grow in around them. Once it's established, I could maybe coppice one of the 5 cherry tree trunks per year, or every other year, see how that goes? And I'll have cherries, the while.
Frankly, the main problem was an aesthetic one. The tops of the pollards are really ugly, unevenly cut, dead old stumps and new stumps and broken bits, and God knows what else. I just need to tidy them up with the saw, new shoots will grow, and nowt's-a-matter, as they used to say in Sunderland.
Management, that's the whole new concept I'm learning, about trees and shrubs on an allotment: The Hedge, forsooth.
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