Summer Hedge trimming 2018 Turnditch Orchard

I noticed our street side hedge was encroaching on to the roadside  footpath. It was time for a trim.

Last year I bought a Makita EN4950H petrol power pole hedge cutter. It has a relatively quiet 4-stroke petrol engine and is not too heavy.   It only took about 30 minutes to trim the 150 metres of hedge up to a height of  two metres, and about as long to sweep up all the cuttings.

Great summer weather and the water tank.

Wow, we are having some glorious 2018 summer weather here in Derbyshire! It is sunny and 28 C most days. The downside for the orchard is there has been little rain and the soil is beginning to dry out. For the first time since the original planting, the fruit trees have a good crop of young fruit this year. To prevent the trees from suffering from drought stress we are watering them every 3 days. Hopefully this will prevent fruit drop from stress. Depending on the size of the tree we are delivering between 40 - 60 litres to the roots of each tree at each watering.  We are going to increase the amount of carpet laid around the roots to help water retention and to keep the weeds away.

The orchard does not have a mains water supply, but we do have a river at one end. The process has been to chuck in a bucket attached to a rope and haul out a bucket of water and tip it into a builder's trough. The volunteers doing the watering take water from the trough.

As the riparian land owner we are permitted to take up to 20 cubic metres (20,000 litres) of water every day without a licence, but we are only using a tiny fraction of that amount. Hauling water this way is hard work, so we've invested in a portable petrol powered water pump. 

This can pump up to 900 litres a minute, so we soon learned to run it at only the lowest throttle setting once the water flow has been established in the pipes. It now delivers water to a builder's trough in the centre of the orchard where we can distribute it to the trees.

We've also installed a 1000 litre water tank (IBC) which we'll keep topped up from the river and use that to water the trees when the pump is not available. 

We keep the pump off-site for obvious reasons. The water in the tank is chemically treated to prevent algae growth.

We are also keeping the section of new hedge watered to keep that growing. We have lost a few of the saplings but over all it is growing well. In a few years we can have it turned into a proper hedge to replace the wire stock fence.

There was a minor irritation on the orchard today. Yesterday when I visited, the cherry tree was laden with fruit, but it was not quite ready for picking. Today, I found almost all of the fruit has gone. I suspect we were raided by pigeons! 

Injury Time Over

Finally, I've been able to get back to work on the orchard. An ankle injury last winter, not on the orchard, prevented me from doing heavy work on rough ground for the past few months. Given the history of previous owners allowing dumping on the land, the ground is quite bumpy and it is easy to twist an ankle while mowing the grass. 

So this week, I've been able to spend a couple of days mowing the waist high grass without causing any repeat pain to my ankle. The trees are doing well this year, particularly the cherry tree which is laden with green fruits. Let's hope it doesn't get raided by pigeons/blackbirds.

Our gate grows legs.

We turned up on the orchard site in Turnditch to give our dogs a run and to collect some ivy, rose hips and branches to use for Christmas decoration.  As I arrived I noticed our old 12 foot steel gate was missing  from the inner gateway.  The roadside gate was still intact, but the old gate which weighs about 40 Kg was no longer in sight. 

A little searching around found the gate in a neighbouring field where "persons unknown" had chosen to relocate and repurpose the gate.  I promptly liberated the gate and returned it to its proper position in our orchard. Being a charitable sort of a guy I've presumed that some workers misunderstood the ownership of the land and its artefacts.

The old gate is now firmly chained to a steel post. This might help people understand that it is private property and not available for alternative purposes. If they need to contact us to discuss such desires they can use the phone number posted by our entrance gate.

Preparing Machinery for Winter

We spent a few hours getting the petrol engined tools which we use in the orchard, ready for winter. I was quite surprised when I realised we now have six such tools. Most of the work was following the maintenance schedule such as oil changes and cleaning air filters. However one item was dealing with fuel (petrol) for the motors. I hadn't realised fuel from the forecourt can go off in as little as 30 days. Using stale fuel can damage a motor, particularly the small high revving 2-strokes.

The usual advice is to drain the fuel systems over Winter and to fill with fresh fuel in the Spring when you start to use the tools again. After some investigation we decided to empty the tanks and refuel them with fresh petrol treated with "Fuel Fit" petrol additive from Briggs and Stratton. This keeps fuel fresh for up to three years. An alternative would be to swap over to Aspen alkylated fuels, they contain fewer impurities and last for a couple of years. Aspen is about three times more expensive than forecourt petrol. Fuel Fit costs about £8 to treat 25 litres of fuel.

None of this equipment is stored on site.

Winching competition

Today saw the annual winching competition in the Turnditch Orchard. In the interest of fairness the teams are offered free choice of equipment and can select their winching tasks in the competition area.  This year the Management team were the clear winners of the event achieving six blackthorn stumps in the allotted time. 

Tirfor type winch

This year we tried out the Power Winch 2500. This pulls quite quickly, but the 2500 lbs pull was no match for the Blackthorn. We stalled the motor when attempting a straight pull of a stump and, in any event, we were worried the surface of the rope may melt on the winch capstan at full pull. We reverted to the tried and tested Tirfor type cable winch (1800Kg), which is slower but significantly greater pulling power.

We used a snatch block to double the pulling power of the winch. The other end of the cable was attached to a 130 mm post which had been driven into the ground, this in turn was backed up by our 16 Kg boat anchor. A new innovation was having the steel wheel rim to change the direction of pull chain to the tree stump. Instead of pulling horizontally, the wheel introduces an upward vector to help lift the root from the ground.

Steel wheel rim helps the pull

Our boat anchor helps the winching

Anchors aweigh!

We've finally been able to get some free time to work in the Turnditch Orchard during the last weekend. There's an area of the plot which we'd partially cleared of blackthorn, but we made the mistake of not completing the task this year. Consequently the blackthorn has re-sprouted and more effort is needed to trim it and remove it from the ground. 

We did some tidying a few weeks ago when we were trying out our Makita long pole petrol hedge trimmer. We used this to cut back some of the undergrowth. Our field trimmer would have struggled with the thorn bush. 

During the past year we've purchased a portable petrol powered capstan winch, namely a PCW5000 to help us safely move some of the logs on the embankment. We were able to use this to easily pull out some of the thorn bush stumps.  Unfortunately we'd not bought enough rope on site, nor our manual winches, so after the first few easy pulls,  we found we were running out of suitable anchor points for the power winch. The blackthorn is quite stubborn when you winch it out. We found that the fence posts we'd hammered in the ground as anchors pulled out before the blackthorn moved. As a consequence we had to stop work.

The testing we'd done was quite fruitful, we've definitely improved our technique of removing the stumps. The whole process is a lot faster. We just need to sort out the anchoring method for the winch points. So this morning I ordered a heavy (16 Kg) steel boat anchor. This will act as a backstop to the fence post anchors we already use, the harder you pull on these anchors the deeper they dig into the ground.

In case anyone reading this article is thinking of visiting the site to acquire some new tools?  Don't bother we don't leave any equipment of value on site.