Bog Myrtle & Peat

As always, this blog is the first thing to fall off the list of priorities when I get busy. It’s no wonder that there has been next to no time for typing up articles over the past few days, as we have finally sorted out legal paperwork on our plans to move house. Our new home is a very old-fashioned galloway farmhouse which includes almost five acres of rough grazing and granite moorland on the edge of a lush, wader-infested carse. We have been hauling trailers of furniture and books up the broken track for the past week, and during that time we’ve seen a fantastic array of wildlife, from adders and kingfishers to curlew and snipe. Although it’s still extremely rough around the edges, the new place is showing tremendous promise for all kinds of interesting projects, and it’s convenient enough to allow work on the Chayne to continue without interruption.

Although it’s late in the season for planting, I celebrated our arrival last night by installing a bundle of hedging plants which fell off the back of a lorry. The hawthorns are parched and deeply unhappy – it is far too late to be moving bare-rooted plants around. Most will probably fail, but it felt like an important milestone to put in a new hedgerow project alongside buying a new house. I will have to bulk these out in the autumn with a range of other species now that the sap is rising, but this is at least a start. Much more on this to come…