hedge cutting is over

Three days of chain sawing privet branches as thick as small trees; dragging and stacking the cuttings (the 'brash') - and revealing young oaks that had become embedded within the encroaching and smothering foliage are over.

We have reduced the height of the privet to six feet knowing that it can grow two feet in  a year. And, as promised, we have left twenty feet of the privet hedge as it was to continue to act as a roosting place for the 'charm' of goldfinches that use the hedge each night: I counted fifty queueing up for bedtime.

We now have mountains of 'brash' to dispose of.

An obvious choice would be a big, smoky bonfire but that would be time consuming and unproductive.

Another choice would be to remove the thousands of branches from the site, but this goes 'against the grain' as we try to reduce our waste and environmental impact. And costly too perhaps.

So, at some point we will hire a commercial shredding machine and have a marathon shredding session in which all will be reduced to a mountain of chippings.

Every part of a privet plant is poisonous and so the chippings must be composted for a year before they are ready to use as valuable organic matter in our barren garden to be!