Phew - grass grows quickly!!

I had an afternoon of hard work using a brush cutter  to trim back some of the grass and weeds to make it look as though the site was not abandoned. I'd left the site alone for a while while I was letting a pulled arm muscle recover, but the grass and wild flowers/weeds took advantage of my absence. They've grown thigh high in places. I burned up a couple of litres of two-stroke petrol to achieve the result.

The hedges which were re-laid in the spring are doing quite well, though there are a few dead patches where we'll have to re-plant hedging. Most of the fruit trees are growing well tough we are a bit concerned with one of the plums which appears to have had a poor start. The walnut tree is a bit slow to leaf.

Edit 23/05/14: A small disaster struck today when I was using the Kawasaki Brush Cutter (KBH27) which we purchased back in Sept 2013 for the site. I was using it on long grass when something broke inside it. The motor runs but the blade doesn't turn. I've checked it out but can see nothing wrong. It is time to ship it back to the dealer.

The Orchard - We've started clearance work.

Yesterday we started the process of clearing the plot in preparation for planning the orchard. The picture below is the strip of land next to the River Ecclesbourne. One of the local farmers has a right of access to his fields through this strip. We managed to to clear back about 80% over the undergrowth in the available time.

Given the uncertainty of what is hidden under the grass and brush we only using hand held tools to clear the ground during this first pass. We were using a Kawasaki KBH27 brush cutter and managed to burn through two tanks full of petrol in the clearing process. We're raking up the felled vegetation and will be hot composting it later. The brush was mostly grass, nettles and some Himalayan Balsam. The Himalayan Balsam is an invasive species and will take a few years of repeated strimming to eradicate.  Given the proximity of the river spraying with chemicals is not an option.

We'll be relaying the hedge on the left hand side of the picture at some point soon. It looks like there's been no proper hedge maintenance for a good few years.  I was pleased to note there is some healthy looking English Elm saplings forming part of the old hedge. We'll do what we can to preserve this species of tree. The question is should we lay Derbyshire Style or Midlands style, I was raised in Buckinghamshire so I prefer the Midlands or Southern Style hedging. 

We also need to have a missing gate post installed in the entrance to the main field to enable us to rehang the steel gate which we found laying on the ground.