Posts Tagged ‘hedge’
Mulling Possibilities
I spent some time trying out my hedge idea yesterday, and whether it ultimately proves adequate for a fence, or not, at least it looks a whole lot better. It also will make it easier to mow all the way up to that border.
Unfortunately, this thicket of mostly buckthorn doesn’t run all the way to the road. There are a couple open spots along the way, so we will still need a fence in those places.
This frustrates me a bit. We need to put up fence for part of that border, but we want to keep as much existing growth as possible, which pretty much prohibits us being able to route any fence through the worst of it.
There is always the possibility that we could locate that northern border fence of the grazing pasture just inside the “hedge line” I am creating, but doing so would, over time, be construed as the property line, which I’d rather not see happen.
This may be an ‘either/or’ situation that I am trying to conform to a ‘both/and’ outcome. There is also the fact that by trying to turn that thicket into a hedge, I have created another task that will need attention during the growing season. To keep it looking nice, it will need to be trimmed regularly. Of course, if the horses can reach it, they will be happy to trim it for me.
The hedge shows potential. I’ll see what Cyndie says when she returns, and together we will mull over the possibilities. But like I wrote above, regardless what we decide, it sure looks a whole lot better now that it has been trimmed.
Buried Wires
Our search to locate the rusty old barbed wired fence that demarcated the northern border of our property has reached a temporary pause. We made it to the end of one section of visible rusted T-posts and wires, but now the wires disappear beneath years, maybe decades, of eroded soil that makes its way down the slope from a plowed field above.
I tried pulling up on the wires, but they are so old and rusted, especially having been buried for years, they just broke. I ventured ahead, further along our property line to a new section of scrub brush, to find someplace where the wires show up above ground again, hoping to work my way back from the other direction. What I found was a batch of grape vines so thick that it makes the thorny area we had previously been working in seem like a luxury.
On the positive side, it appears we could grow grapes! This vine sure looks fruitful! Maybe if I give it good attention for a few years, pruning and supporting it, I could nurture a harvest-able crop. Fresh squeezed grape juice would be a real treat.
I did also find where the wires come up out of the ground onto another T-post. As I followed the wires into the ground there, I discovered that they can’t be pulled up from this direction because they are now running beneath years of growth of the thick wood shoots of the grape vines.
At this point, my plan is to just run our new fence in a line between the last posts I did locate. 
The property line is supposed to be straight, anyway, so there’s no real mystery as to where the fence should be. And, there is no sense digging up the buried barbed wire, just to get rid of it. In this case, buried wire is the same as no wire at all.
I have also decided that for the remainder of the thick sections in the direction toward the street, we can forego trying to cut away enough brush to put a fence down the middle, and instead, just use the entire mass of trees as our fence. I will trim the branches on our side so they form a clean line, creating the impression of a tall hedge.
That’s the theory, anyway. We’ll see if my idea works after I spend many hours and a lot of energy pruning trees to test it out.
Relative Something 