or, as I have found, can be used to make traditional knees in boat building. My first rowing boat contains ash and chestnut knees formed from material sourced whilst hedge laying. Laying a hedge also creates the perfect nest-building habitat. The angled stems, woven together and then supported by stakes and upright re-growth, make the ideal support for nest building. So a well-laid hedge will increase biodiversity, work as a stock fence, provide material for walking sticks and other projects, provide firewood, remove the need to use steel fencing, and can also provide a good site for foraging if the species used are well chosen. Surely this productive and diverse hedgerow, which can be managed with hand tools, must be a more sustainable alternative to repeated cutting with a tractor and flail cutter.
28 December
I was greeted this morning by the perfect winter day. A good, crisp frost meant I needed a couple of layers under my Swandri, but after an hour of work the sun was warming me and I shed a layer. I started on the hedgerow down the northern side of Meera’s wood. This hedge will wind for about a mile and I look forward to the day when I can stand back and see the hedge in its full glory, matured and bursting with wildlife and wild food. It’s hard to find words to encompass the sense of satisfaction and fulfilment I get from planting trees and hedgerows. Such work should be part of everyone’s life. A year of ‘national service’ to improve our environment would be a good statement for an evolving society.
I chose hawthorn and blackthorn as the main species, as they lay well and form an impenetrable boundary. They also produce sloes and haws from which to make wines or jellies. In addition, I planted hazel to provide nuts and materials for craft use; spindle to add diversity and create sticks for artists’ charcoal; field maple to have its sap tapped for wine; holly for berries for the Christmas market; Guelder rose for its medicinal cramp bark; dog rose and rugosa rose for the hips for rose hip syrup; cherries for fruit (for the birds); a few oak standards to grow and mature from within the hedge to form ancient trees for future generations, increasing the hedge’s biodiversity; and crab apple for pollination and the making of verjuice.
Verjuice
Collect ripe crab apples and leave them in a plastic bag to sweat. After a few days press out the juice and then bottle it, leaving cotton wool in the top as it will ferment because of the natural yeasts. It will be ready in about a month and makes a traditional substitute for lemon juice. It is particularly good in salad dressings and stir fries.
After eight good years of growth, I laid the hedge and now sheep graze in the fields without any fencing, the hedge successfully keeping them within the field. Planting hedgerows and laying hedges that I can return to as I walk the parish, harvesting wild food and produce that I know is there, form part of my farming of the surrounding countryside.
Bordering the common is one of the orchards I have planted over the past 20 years. Now the trees are producing well and the orchard provides cider apples for the village pressing. I planted ‘Harry Masters Jersey’, ‘Crimson King’, ‘Yarlington Mill’ and ‘Kingston Black’, and they all make a fine cider, whether mixed or fermented out to single-variety ciders. The trees are pruned as standards, which allows sheep to graze beneath, a traditional silvi-pastoral system that I expect we will see more of in the coming years. Lodsworth has always been a cider-making area and throughout the village well-established old trees can be seen, now enclosed in gardens from parts of the old orchards of days gone by. I remember old Ted Holmes telling me before he died of the mobile press that used to turn up outside the Hollist Arms pub, and the excitement he experienced as a young lad on apple-pressing day.
I remember the tasting on the first night we revived the tradition. It was election night when we brought the cider to the bar of the Hollist Arms. Nick Kennard was the landlord then, and with his wife Sally they ran the house well (although the beer was sometimes interesting!). The cider was strong that year and I noticed after a couple of hours that tongues were loosening, quite literally in the case of a respectable couple who worked for the European Union. The evening evolved into a party and the next morning Lodsworth was one place in England where many of the residents had no idea that Tony Blair had been elected for his first term as prime minister. Since that time our cider making has improved and the quality of the drink is more refined. Many a good winter’s evening has been spent racking and blending to ensure the best quality is available for village functions.
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Ted Holmes was a forester/coppice worker who worked mainly on the adjacent Cowdray estate. Ted would nod at me but rarely spoke – I was a different type of coppice worker, I lived up in the woods. One evening in the Hollist Arms, I bought Ted a beer or two, and he told me the story of his life as a boy in the village and the work he would do. His descriptions of village life painted a vivid picture for me – I could see his early-morning work in the bakery, then, moving on to the wheelwrights, how he would throw water over the metal tyre to cool it before it burned the wood of the wheel. Traditionally the metal tyre would be heated so that it expanded, and when it was glowing red it would be fitted over the wooden wheel rim and hammered into place. Once in place it was doused with water to stop burning the wood and the cooling process would shrink the metal tyre tight on to the wooden wheel, compressing it all together. A wheelwright was an important profession and with three blacksmiths all working in the village it was a thriving small community.
Ted talked to me about the cider, and in particular the plum and gage orchards that grew to the north of the village and the abundance of cob nuts along the eastern edge. Fruit picking formed part of his day as a boy as it does mine now. I’ve planted plums and gages in similar areas of the parish to where Ted mentioned they grew, and so far the trees have grown well and crops have been good. There is a lot of knowledge of our localities locked up in the memories of the older generations that will be useful in the future, when we are likely to need to become more locally based and self-supporting, and need to be able to turn our hands to a variety of different skills.
The cob nut orchard that ran along the eastern edge of the village has been lost amongst the many houses and gardens that have been built. Some gardens have one or two established nut trees remaining, but in a couple of places the orchard has remained intact and I’ve been fortunate to spend time restoring these areas.
When I first cut the derelict orchard, or ‘platt’, as a cob nut orchard is often called, it was a matter of cutting back thick, overgrown stems and reshaping the cob nut trees to form a goblet shape. The re-growth is then ‘brutted’ (snapped so that the branch is stressed and left to hang, still well attached to the mother tree by the fibres
