18/01/2026
Quite often, the best thing to do is nothing. This has long been my philosophy, but today I have proven its value to myself, if no one else…!
Since the forced “de-livestockification“ over the past few years and the continuation of that with the “Greenland doctrine“ of East West Rail (we’re going to take your land, one way or the other…) I have accelerated tree planting and gradually taken out corners of land that don’t fit into the alley system. Some have been actively planted, but a lot just left alone and the blackthorn in the hedgerows has spread into the field. Blackthorn thickets are very good at blocking light from reaching the soil and killing off grass - this not only reduces competition for anything that you may want to plant into the thicket, but also in theory moves the soil away from a bacterial dominance that grass thrives in, to a fungal dominance that trees prefer. Today’s planting proved that theory as I decided to plant some of my “pioneer quads” into areas that have no trees.
Convinced that trees do prefer to grow in close proximity to each other, even though in time some may out-compete and displace others, I have planted my pioneer plants in groups of four trees within one 40cm mesh guard. The main species is Norway maple, as I have bitter experience of its ability to spread easily germinating seeds far and wide! That can be annoying in a suburban setting, but when you are desperate for trees to take over it’s quite a useful thing! In the quad with these are common alder as a nitrogen fixer, willow as a bridge species and an ash just in case the maple doesn’t make it.
As the photos show, as soon as I drilled into the blackthorn thicket soil I turned up a lovely layer of mycelium and once the planting holes were drilled, there was an obvious layer of fungal mycelium about 2-3” down. In contrast, the previously grass are was pure clay with no signs of life, despite having had a thick mulch of coppiced hedge on it for 3 years.
I have a lot of cobnut saplings ready to plant out and am now very likely to plant them into the blackthorn to take advantage of the better soil conditions.
Going forward, it may even be easiest to plant blackthorn into areas that need planting and let them do their thing for a few years to prepare the ground for me. I will certainly be allowing current thickets to expand and will be moving some mowed paths to allow this.
