Hedge Planting

The same applies to hedges and, over the last 5 years we’ve planted 10,000 metres of new hedges on the estate. Each new hedge contains up to 9 species of native hedge plants. Some of these are now reaching maturity and they make an excellent field boundary habitat for our wild birds, insects and even small mammals. As part of our Countryside Stewardship Scheme we will only cut each side of the hedge one year in three. We try to cut the hedges at the end of the Winter once the birds have eaten all the fruit that is available. This makes for challenging management as we need to cut many hedges and can’t do all of them at the optimum time.