FARMING MATTERS: Tackling overgrown trees in the garden

Grass is the biggest crop on our farm, it feeds the cattle and sheep in the summer and is conserved as hay and silage to feed them in the winter.

But in addition to the grass in the fields, we have an awful lot of it growing in the garden, around the buildings, up the lane and on the road verges, which all has to be kept trimmed and tidy.

We do this with a variety of machines, a regular Viking petrol mower, a sit on Husqvarna mower and on the lane and the road verges we use the tractor and eight foot field mower. The strimmer also gets used a lot to trim the edges and get to the parts none of the mowers can reach.

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Recently it’s become impossible to mow the garden properly due to the overgrown trees, many with branches loaded with heavy apples actually touching the ground.

Tree work should be done in the winter months, but last year there wasn’t an opportunity to do all of it at the right time and so we have all ended up getting scratched, scraped and on some occasions, even bleeding, whilst trying to mow the garden.

Something had to be done, and so it was. The chainsaw came out recently and a day was spent cutting back Bramley, Cox, Golden Delicious, Discovery, Victoria plum, Elders, Hazel, Ash,Mulberry and Maple trees.

Two bonfires were created and the Merlo was brought in and the bucket filled three times with branches to be taken over to the larger bonfire on the farm.

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Clearly we’ve lost a lot of apples, and the moral to this story is to make sure all the trees are cut at the right time. But the garden now looks open and workable and hopefully the mowing will be a lot easier and more pleasant and there will be no more injuries.

To be fair, some tree work was carried out during the winter. Back then the Merlo was brought into the garden with the cage to enable higher branches to be taken down.

The video on this page shows one of the trees on the farm being trimmed.

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