FENCELINE FINESSE

            The feedback from the fence line blog was great and it makes me want to offer more nuance to the discussion.

            I’m very aware that cutting the autumn olive and multiflora rose does not kill it.  New sprouts are edible if you have something that can graze it.  Grazing animals will nip it; the goal is to arrest it, to get it into a more tender edible state.

            But what if you don’t have animals on the other side of the fence?  Here’s the key—keep after the brush and let the trees develop.  I’ve done this for decades and now have some fence lines that 30 years ago were jungles of overgrown brush.  Today the brush is gone and instead nicely spaced trees line the fence lines.

            Plants secrete auxins; dominant plants secrete more.  This is an anti-competitive plant hormone to make sure the winners win and competitors lose.  The goal of good long-term fence line maintenance is to keep whacking the junk (we’ve always found once every 5 years is enough) and letting whatever is good become more dominant.

            The good dominant plants (trees) also shade out the understory, further impeding brush growth.  Over time, you can turn a fence line into a beautiful tree-lined linear space rather than an overgrown jumble.  The idea is to create something valuable that incentivizes you to keep after the pruning.  Good trees are valuable.

            In the ideal world, you’d line all your fence lines with orchard trees, but the best I’ve been able to do is bring on really useful regular trees.  In our area, locust especially likes to grow in the high sunlight areas around pasture edges and on our farm we now have enough to supply all our posts and shed building poles for decades. Have you priced fence posts and poles lately?

            On a boundary fence, you can’t have a clean zone behind it.  We never make clean driving zones on the other side of a fence.  Pasture is on one side and over time, a nice tree edge is on the other side.  That said, you’ll never get to a completely no-maintenance place, but you can definitely reduce it over time by bringing on nice-growing high quality trees.  Then when you clean the area, adding all that undergrowth around the base of your selected trees adds mulch and protection to help them grow better.

            When the ground is damp, in the spring, autumn olive pops out easily with a front end loader.  If you get to them with a machine and don’t destroy good crop trees you’d like to keep, popping them out with a loader is great.  Until they are 6 feet tall, a mattock works real well, and I do plenty of that.  The key is to keep after it; this kind of landscape caress is not a one-and-done deal. 

            One final thing.  Prune overhanging branches up high so the animals don’t shade up right under the trees and kill the grass by over-impaction.  Sit in a front end loader and trim up as high as you can reach.  That way the tree won’t shade against its truck; it’ll cast the shade farther out and let the grass grow right up to the base of the tree.  The best deterrent to brush is a healthy sod.

            What is something you’ve worked at for many years that is now really paying back and making you realize all that perseverance was worth it?