Ever wondered what to do with all that brash left over from pruning or clearing work undertaken this winter? Rather than sending it off to be chipped or burned, why not turn it into a dead hedge – a wildlife-friendly fortress of twigs, branches, and general woody odds and ends?
That’s exactly what a fantastic group of volunteers and I have been doing at Castle Heather, Inverness, and let me tell you, the local wildlife is already taking notice!
A dead hedge is exactly what it sounds like: a row of sturdy stakes knocked into the ground with heaps of cut branches and twigs wedged in between. It’s a no-fuss, all-natural barrier that doubles as a five-star refuge for birds, insects, and small mammals.
We do this in my local park.
We coppice the hazel and blackthorn to get long straight stakes that we sharpen, and we pleach those along a path to form hedgerows. We then use long hawthorn for the binding, though we get that from another park.
It’s pretty fun.