Marking Out Pathways (Field Art) - Part 1
So, time is marching on and I am hoping to start planting next month sometime - if the temperature drops sufficiently.
I have had confirmation that the horses will be leaving us in November (around bonfire night I think) which gives me very few reasons not to crack on.
The problem is, the plan is still a bit vague - and I need to firm it up now. The Woodland Trust gave me the green light after their visit. They didn't see any major problems with my design (although it was all a bit rough and ready to be honest).
Before we can plant, we need to know where to plant, and the location of the planting will really be "everywhere there isn't a path or clearing". So the paths are really the first things to mark out.
After a lengthy discussion about Glyphosate with my good friend and adviser Owen (as a chemical it appears it isn't anywhere near as bad as I had imagined) , it was decided that the way to mark the paths out was using chemicals rather than to try and strim the grass to a short enough length to make the paths visible (the horses have shortened the grass enough to make that tricky - which to be fair, was their job).
My kids , some time ago when we failed to win a bid on another piece of land, had already produced some art work for the key woodland shape. I expected it to be a doddle to transpose onto the field but in actual fact, it took an evening of drawing huge circles with string and pegs and a lot of measuring and walking around. Even then, we only managed half of the design in the one evening.
A big thank you to Subby Steve for his patient assistance and for taking photo's to record the action.
Having sprayed our design on the grass, we are now waiting for the glyphosate to do its magic and kill some narrow strips of grass to see if we have got the design right (then we can finish it - and then I can work out where the rest of the paths are going). Frustratingly, it seems glyphosate works by preventing photosynthesis, and there isn't a lot of that going on in October, so I might have to wait for a few weeks until the grass has died enough to see where we sprayed. I would love to get cracking but it seems I am going to have to be patient. Hopefully we can get some drone photographs once we think we have things done correctly, and then we will have a line to plant up to and we can progress.
One added bonus of picking a calm evening to work with the chemical sprayer (so it didn't blow where we didn't want it to go) is that we had the most amazing warm calm weather in which to work - and the sunset views were stunning.
Several people stopped on the top road to take photographs of the sunset. One of them looked to have quite a serious looking camera so I said hello. It turned out to be a nice chap called James who takes professional photographs. As you can see, he got some cracking ones that night.
Thanks James for the photos.
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