Bog Myrtle & Peat

I don’t think I put enough thought into planting up the new wood. I took six ten foot silver birches from a friend and planted them on the higher, drier ground. Four of them promptly died. I then put six five foot larches on the lower ground where standing water gushes through the soil. They are starting to look ill.

I knew that birches liked moist soil, but I hadn’t reckoned on the dry spell we’ve been having recently. The Chayne hasn’t seen serious rain in around a fortnight, and although it has by no means dried out, some shallow, pebbly soils have become extremely powdery. This would be fine for well established trees, but transplanting adult vegetation can be very damaging and a great deal of water can be lost. It took four days for the leaves on the silver birches to shrivel away and fall off, and if I had visited that corner of the farm during  that time, I would have been able to fix it with a bucket of water.

Over compensating, I planted the larches in the wettest corner of the triangle, then returned home to discover that they don’t really like wet ground and would either die straight off or struggle for a few years and settle as skinny, stunted bushes. It is not a huge disaster because I have access to thousands of other self-sown trees from a generous friend with an area of forestry near the Chayne, but it is always quite humbling to learn from your mistakes.

While I have been working on the triangle, I often look up to see the black grouse watching me from the dyke two hundred yards up the hill. I bet he thinks I’m an idiot.