bye bye leylandii !!

Some of you will remember the leylandii hedge round by the orchard.  NOT a thing of beauty, in fact an eyesore that progressively shaded the bottom sheep-field and the orchard. Bloody things just kept getting bigger and bigger. A fairly drastic haircut a few years ago just seemed to stimulate it to grow faster...

Well, the leylandii are no more!

You can see the size of the trees in these two pictures above 

... and the extent to which they shaded the orchard 

It took Yvon and a couple of his mates a short morning to cut them all down to a handy post-sized metre and a half.  That was the easy bit.

The hedge belonged to our neighbours, Marie-Claire and Yvon, but as they don't want the wood, we are going to salvage the stuff big enough for firewood and Yvon will take the rest of the fluffy-stuff away and burn it. (I had envisaged shredding it, but the piles of cut down trees are enormous). We reckon there's at least years worth of house heating in this lot, once its well-dried.

Once the field is clear again, Yvon will cultivate it and re-seed it.  So we need to get this lot dismantled and moved ASAP. We cleared about a metre and a half of one pile this evening...

The field will definitely need some TLC after all this! 

The soil under the hedge is bone dry, 
so now the grass should grow much better

these are the resulting piles of wood to be cleared 
- basically a field-full

The other time constraint is that Easter is fast approaching, and one is not allowed to light a bonfire between Easter and the end of September.
Well, you can, but if it gets out of hand, and burns down someone's crop or house then you are liable... so perhaps best avoided.
Its going to be a busy few weeks I think - I had better stock up on the ibuprofen!