Fencing through scrub

Another Friday work party with the Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust to secure the canal bank vegetation from grazing cattle. This time, a slight change in strategy from Pete. There is money available to fence all the way along, so we won’t use intermediate scrub areas as protection.

This means we’ll remove all the remaining bramble along the bank, which also hinders the creation of the type of vegetation that water voles like. The immediate problem today was that the fencing team were close to the first remaining scrub patch, so I needed to just cut a path through that so they could continue.

I fitted the mulching blade onto the brush cutter and adjusted the handlebars low so that the blade was above my head in the harness. This allowed a slicing action to cut through the tall bramble.

There are reptiles on this site and we know they take shelter in these patches, so I stopped cutting at about six inches off the ground.

Once the material was raked out, it was sufficient for the rammers to knock the fence line in. In future, I can go in again and remove the remaining scrub on each side of the fence, again to a height of six inches. Finally in a few weeks, after the site is cleared and no longer attractive to reptiles, I can cut those stalks down to the ground and encourage the grassland to spread into this area next season.

I then moved to the top of the meadow and continued cutting inside the penned off areas where the cattle can’t graze. This is very long, and way too late in the year, but we managed to cut and rake off the huge volume of grass and deposit it in the dead hedge. This should enable a number of herbaceous plants to flower and set seed next year.