Our internet is still down at home, so posting will be sporadic; thanks for being patient.
We had a good Easter weekend, and I used the opportunity to
trim the hedgerow willows with the help of The Girl and two of her friends. I
wish I had trimmed them more and earlier, cutting them in the old style -- halfway
through the base and folding them down, so that the trees are woven together
like baskets but continue to live and thicken.
Such horizontal trees, still attached to their roots, could develop
into a thick and even hedgerow, impenetrable to all but the smallest animals,
and provides privacy, a home for small creatures, a source of wild rejuvenation
for the soil, and a vertical salad bar of fruits and berries.
It would also cover a bit of annoyance to me, a section of
hedgerow in which nothing taller than weeds will grow. My guess is that the
navvies who dug the canal 250 years ago also sealed its banks with a cement-like
clay, and dumped or spilled some on that spot. I occasionally find Buick-sized
lumps of the grey “slag,” as locals call it – including one while digging the
trench for our chicken run, which took 10 per cent of the trench’s distance but
more time and effort than the rest of it combined.
I planted rows of willow shoots across the hedge’s thin
patch last year, but only a few of them survived. If I could fold down the
large and healthy willows on its edge, however, they could remain attached to
their old roots but extend their barrier, shade and privacy many metres over
the space where roots struggle to gain hold.
Most springs I was too busy to do this, but the willows will
wait no longer; winds howl across the Bog of Allen in winter, and the trees
sway and groan that they need trimming. One did more than groan; its trunk
twisted and half-broke, its upper branches hanging on sideways like a flip-top
lid.
Even what remained was too tall to cut without possibly
falling into the road and hitting a passing neighbour, so I had to shimmy up
the trunk, hatchet on belt, to the point where the tree’s upper branches were
twisted down, and hack away at the joint while I and my hatchet swayed in the
spring breeze. I eventually got it down with the help of the three girls – I
had tied a rope to the dangling branches and the girls, a safe distance from
underneath, pulled the other end like a tug of war.
There was another reason we wanted to trim the willows this
spring; we need to build a fence. My mother-in-law, who is home during the day
and who minds both the garden and the chickens, has found that we can’t allow
both in the same place. Come spring we have been letting the chickens roam the
yard, and are happy we did so; they look healthier, and our grass is both
nicely trimmed and presumably freer from pests. Their favourite foods, however,
are our herbs, and if we want any for ourselves we have to fence them off.
Thus, The Girl and I are trying to build a wattle fence. I
wrote about wattle recently for Mother Earth News; a “wattle” was a wicker
fence or wall made of a pliable wood like willow or hazel, woven around upright
posts like a horizontal basket. Farmers sometimes surrounded their fields with
wattle fences, which could be made in modular, lightweight pieces a metre or
two high and a metre or two across – hurdles -- and then uprooted, carried to a
new location, and stamped into the ground where needed.
The farmer usually created a wattle by putting the upright
posts, sometimes called zales or sails, into a wooden frame, sometimes called a
gallows, to hold them in place. Then withies – slim cuttings of willow or hazel
– were wound back and forth around the uprights. At the end of the hurdle the
withy would be twisted for greater flexibility, wound around the last zale, and
woven back in the other direction. Usually a gap would be left in the middle of
the hurdle, called a twilly hole, which allowed a shepherd or farmer to carry a
few hurdles as a time on his back.
According to author Una McGovern, hurdle fences were vital
to medieval agriculture; by keeping sheep confined without the need for
permanent infrastructure, they allowed tenant farmers to graze sheep on a patch
of land, letting them manure the fields one by one and deposit the fertilisers
necessary for cereal crops.
The Girl and I started the fence using the old method of
marking where we wanted it to start and end, and tying a string taut along the
path. We spent the day gathering armfuls of willow from the hedge and hacking
away at the ones thick enough to be posts, and hopefully, next weekend, we can
make more progress on the fence itself. As with most of our projects, this is
an experiment – as I told The Girl, we’ll either find out what works, or we’ll
find out what doesn’t.
I'll be able to post more when our internet is up again. Also, feel free to check out my
latest article at Grit magazine.
