Neighbours and trees

8:08 PM Tuesday, 16 February 2010
Temperature: 40 F, partly cloudy and calm

This morning's excitement was provided by the polled pregnant ewe having escaped her enclosure again. How she jumps a four foot fence, while so advanced in her pregnancy, is a wonder. Unfortunately, it is an inconvenient wonder. Fortunately, she is easily tempted back with the promise of fresh, tasty hay. We expect lambing any day now. The pregnant ewes have frontal silhouettes like donkeys carrying sacks of grain.

The rest of today was mostly routine, with a feeding for the animals in the morning and evening both. Minnow's kits have not yet opened their eyes, but they are very active. They do chase after her, but Minnow seems to want to wean them and let them eat hay. We have to be a little generous with bird feed owing to the insistence of the sheep, but rather than split the flock of birds from the flock of sheep time was dedicated to digging a couple more holes for planting orchard trees.

This is a recurring theme: that there are a vast number of productive tasks which could be performed, but the ones with deadlines attached to them take precedence.

While digging, one of our northern neighbours came to speak with us, and raised the topic of trees. There is a double row of closely planted douglas firs all along the northern periphery of the property. They have two roles:

• they form a privacy barrier between the properties
  
• they are a windbreak for the land on either side
  

They fill these roles well, but they have three problems:

• they take up enough space for a whole row of orchard trees
• they are tall enough that a strong wind might topple them, and crush buildings
• they are completely shading the neighbour's garden.

The neighbour is very polite, and not pressing the point at all, but it's hard to disagree with him. There might not be the time to do all this for their garden this year, but in the course of discussion the idea was proposed of a Devon hedge. Such a hedge is an earth bank or wall with hedgerow shrubs woven together on top, and grass or similar growth binding the sides together as well. We don't have the stone in our local earth to face such a hedge with stone, or that would have been an option as well.

It is a shame to cut down dozens of trees, decades old, but we have the problem that the placement of the trees, aside from taking up about a quarter of an acre by themselves, was not very far sighted in terms of the risk posed by trees evolved for a forest setting, exposed to prevailing winds. A mature douglas fir which fell on our orchard would certainly do a lot of damage. We have to seek a compromise of the aesthetic and practical considerations.

Nothing is perfect.