Bog Myrtle & Peat

Battling away with a strip of twenty five year old sitka spruces as I have been for the past seven months, I was relieved at the weekend to start work on a new project. Around seventy years ago, a small inbye paddock above the farm buildings was planted with a scattering of sitka spruces, hemlocks and larches. The trees now tower high over the track which leads out onto the moor, and gradually, they are starting to fall down. Branch by branch, they snap off in the wind and pull the topstones from the dyke below. They have outlived their uselfulness as a windbreak, and now they’ve got to go.

The black grouse spent long hours throughout the spring lekking all around the tiny 3/4 acre strip, but he is decidedly unusual. On the whole, I should imagine that black grouse would not like to hang around near a farmyard full of collie puppies, hens and humans, so once I have cut down the trees, there is not much point in replanting them to create a stronghold of heather and blaeberry. However, it is a good opportunity to stick in a few dozen birches on the ground between the bog and the moorland, and I should think that, at worst, new trees certainly wouldn’t do any harm.

First things first though, and I have to clear the massive trees before I can go any further. Some of them are tremendously tall, and a small scattering of rowans and scots pines need to be carefully salvaged from the destruction. A two ton sitka spruce falling willy nilly into the undergrowth is sure to do some damage to the existing plant life, not to mention the ancient dyke system which runs all around the wood, and each cut needs to be carefully planned. The trees have now reached a height at which the dense mat of needles underneath has been overgrown with rushes and bracken, so I won’t have the same problems of acidic sterility that I am having with the woodcock strip further up the hill.

Once the trees are down and light gets in, the undergrowth should shoot up, and using the shelter of a handful of beeches and sycamores, the new silver birches may well have some value for black grouse in the future, despite the fact that they will be within shouting distance of the farm buildings.