All Terrain

I risked life and limb today and started a trial on the mighty Thuja hedge. Some 50 years old and having been badly neglected, for several years, around 10 years ago, it was "butchered" in November 2014 in an emergency action at exactly the wrong time of year, being cut down from around 6 metres to 3 metres. It has never recovered properly.

My wish to get rid off it completely remains a wish but at least I want to show that with a bit of further brutal looking work, it can be made to look a bit better. So I set to on a small section where it mattered less, cutting out all the dead wood. I guess a section of about 5 metres or 10% of the total length. Ended up with lots of good very dry firewood and a trailer load of small dead branches and twigs that are awful to clear up being very long and bendy and horribly intertwined. In order to get space in the trailer, I had to constantly chainsaw the pile to get it reduced in size. An extra photo of the days work.

I would actually love to be able to use a wood chopper to produce large wood chips but my chopper is too small and slow to make it worthwhile. I may yet try at least doing a few sackloads to use as fire starters.

By late afternoon managed to clear up and have a trailer load to go to the compost yard which is only open for a few hours on Monday and otherwise only on Friday and Saturday.

After that took the dogs for an evening walk on part of the Schickling walk near Ottobeuren and managed to get Flash to get as far as the "beach" where he can dip his toes in the water and Luna take a full blown swim. It's still very cold here with nighttime temperatures dipping into single figures. I naturally got told off later by Angie for getting her wet in the evening with no sunshine to dry her out before bedtime.

On our walk to the beach, were overtaken by a mixed age group of MTB riders, I think from our parish, out enjoying the relative cool. Had been thinking of my son quite a bit today who really enjoys his MTB rides several times a week out on the South Downs with his mixed age group.

And just for the record on this recordbreakinghot day in the UK, the field next to our property was cut for silage for the third time this year.