Maxim Karavaev. Hedgerows in a Kin Domain 06.02.2019 18:56:34

The hedge - is a multifunctional part of Domain, the most time-consuming part,  but through it all the most beneficial part. We have more and more animals every year: different birds, and lizards, there are many grasshoppers, dragonflies. There have been growing a lot of strawberries and wild strawberries. Mushrooms are growing right in the hedge.

It all started in 2014. We made the most important conclusions. The first - it is difficult for plants in the Urals without watering in the spring, since all the water still flows over the frozen ground, and it does not soak up moisture. Without mulch, everything grows poorly, plants are frosting and weakly growing, quickly overgrown with grass and generally die.

We've already had an experiments with mulch in the second year. We bought 5 haystacks and rolled them right on the turf in July so that they could plant it in September. We thought like that - in good land. It turned out that digging hay and digging the turf, even it's not so dense, is so hard. With great effort, we planted 70 meters of hedge. The first row - bushes, every 0.6 meters, bushes from 1 to 2.5 meters. The second row - tall bushes, 3-7 meters, in increments of every 1.8 meters. And the third row is already inside of Domain - every 5 meters of trees.

In 2015 we planted - 70 meters (experimentally), without digging hay into the holes. Planting seedlings is laborious without digging, even if the hay has lain for half a year. In the second year (in 2016), it was difficult for us to remove the turf from the holes around the seedlings - it rapidly began to grow from under the hay at the edges in the holes, and began to quench the root system of the seedlings, which greatly complicated the growth of seedlings. So, we had to remove it from there in manual mode and loosen the earth. But, as you can see in the photo, the result is amazing. Picture taken in July 2018.

In 2016, we planted two hedges inside the domain. They separate different forests: cedar from oak, linden and maple. These little forests were also planted right away: 60 oaks of acorns, 60 maples and 40 linden.

We began to think how to make it even easier the plant care. Planting takes a lot of time. We decided to try the method described in the books of Vladimir Megre. We took a tractor and harrowed the next 680 meters around the domain. The shrubs that were planted in 2014 had to be transplanted, otherwise we could not plant the entire fence. It turned out that the plow simply turned over large lumps of turf and thus it was impossible to plant in such place. We decided to hire 5 people for 4 days, they broke all big pieces of soil into small pieces. After we packed everything with hay. In the autumn, a hedge was planted in such soil. The turf did not form in the holes, and the maintenance and growth of the plants was more noticeable.

The hedge is also some kind of unpretentious fruit for us: irga, viburnum, hawthorn, sea buckthorn, wild apples and pears, different types of bird cherry tree, aronia (black chokeberry), fruit honeysuckle, rosehip fruit, quince, various plums, shrub cherry, cherry tree.

Different species of them for birds: mountain ash, cotoneaster, barberry, snowberry, elderberry red and black, and others. There are many blooming and beautiful ones: lilac, bubblepark, spindle tree, silverweed, chubushnik, spirea, Padubolithia mahonia, Myrikariya, God's tree, viburnum buldenezh, viburnum orchard and others.
Nuts: black, gray, Manchu, hazelnut and hazelnut red, horse chestnut, Siberian and Far Eastern cedar, mountain pine. There are also honey plants: silver goof, Ginal maple, acacia.

Trees that protect against upper winds: lindens, maples, English oak and red, Mongolian oak, pine, birch, aspen, weeping willow, black alder, larch, ash and elm.
It so happened that we have a rose in the hedge. It blooms every year. When we planted the first 70 meters, everything was somehow very crumpled. SMy wife was looking for seedlings by herself. This is how the rose went into a hedge and grew, it is taller than me. The tip freezes every year. It freezes every year because it holds it's leaves until the frosts. But I like her so much. And it recovers every year and grows further.

Hedge in winter

You can see traces of the hare here. They girdle oaks, black elderberry and globular apple trees. It is better to cover up that parts that mostly eaten with garden pitch. It makes the apple tree to  restore faster. By the way, everyone said that hares only eat up trunks in winter. This year, in the summer, we had two or three oaks in the grove. Of all the bushes only spirea - not a single bush for three years of the deceased. Other species still died during transplantation - even dogrose, acacia, cotoneaster, aronia (chernoplodka), barberry. So the landings in the Urals must be take care very well.

Ignorance prevented us to plant a lot of different plants in the hedge, thus not all plants remain alive.

But part of them is still alive and makes us happy, for example, nuts. We also tried to plant more horse chestnuts, but they almost all died, only two or three remained, but they are still not growing. We've learned a lot from this. Planting material must be sought precisely of Ural origin. Some of the seedlings that we bought turned out to be from the seeds of central Russia, and it was very difficult for them to grow in the Urals.

Maxim Karavaev

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