Clearing Bracken

Hi, my names Rick and I'm new here. I'd like some advice about a piece of semi wooded ground I have bought. I live in Devon but unfortunately don't have a garden with my house so I have bought an acre from a friend a mile or so away from my home.

It is in the corner of a field and could best be described as a wooded corner with a large clearing in the middle. The trees are deciduous and dense around the edge but become increasingly sparse toward the middle with none at all in the half acre clearing in the center.

The center is fairly undulating and is covered with a thick layer of bracken.

What I'd like to do is to remove the bracken, level the ground and replant as a lawn.

I'd like some advice on how I could achieve this, so far I've considered pigs, tarpaulin, weed killer and pulling to remove the bracken. Once the weeds are removed I'd hire a small digger to level the plot and then rot-ovate and reseed with grass seed.

Please could you tell me what I need to consider when trying to kill the bracken, if I covered it with tarp for ages would that kill it and stop it returning? Would pulling it up?

Also being a partially wooded area, is there anything I'd need to think about as far as soil composition goes?

Thanks for reading this far, any help would be gratefully received, thank you, Rick.

 

Welcome to GC Rick! sounds an interesting project!

 

Bracken is a pain in the behind.

If you can keep on top of it, simply regularly mowing your lawn will keep the bracken under control, but if its in the area, you'll never be able to let your guard down. Bracken is a primitive plant that pre-dates the evolution of flowers and seeds. Instead it produces spores, in colossal numbers. So fine they are like dust and will travel on a breeze for miles, so getting rid of the bracken that's already there (either manually or through the use of chemicals) is not going to solve the long term problem. I think you'll just have to seed your lawn (when you're ready to do so) and just keep mowing it to keep new bracken shoots from establishing.

 

Hi, thanks for the responses

I think though that if I can get rid of it from the 'glade' then the nature of the plot, ie it is surrounded by trees, will keep the spores out. Also, there does not seem to be a lot of bracken in the general area my plot is located.

This brings me onto another question. I'd like to make the area private and enclosed as it has roads running either side.

What plant could I use to encourage a dense hedge to grow around the outside. I'm not too fusses about the look or type of plant, ideally it would grow really quickly and densely. As I mentioned, the outside edge is surrounded by trees and so I'd like to create an impenetrable lot of foliage to develop between and including the trees.

Sorry for asking so many questions, cheers, Rick.

 

The standard hedging is hawthorn, sometimes mixed with blackthorn, maybe wild roses, elder etc.

For the rapid growth you want, have a google for 'Willow fedge'. It uses a hybrid willow especially bred for its rapid, very flexible growth, and it is Rapid with a capital R. Its cheap, fast, and easy.

Other options might include things like Elderberry trees. I put some in my back garden to mask off the 8ft jail fence 2 years ago. I've cut it since to encourage it to thicken up but its still 6ft tall and dense enough to hide much of the fence. Its fragrant too, and being native, it wont look out of place.

Rowan, Birch and Poplar are all fairly fast natives.

None of those I've mentioned are evergreen. You could address that partly maybe with evergreen varieties of honeysuckle, or there's always ivy. Box and Holly are evergreen and dense, but take a gazillion years to become anything significant, so unless you're minted, probably practical as the main ingredient of any real solution.

Conifers are the easy and tempting option, especially the one who's name must not be spoken (Leylandii), but to get round an acre or two it would be quite expensive, and it would look rubbish and be a maintenance nightmare. Depending on where your land is, you could even end up with people on your case about it (I have a chunk of land too, its mine, yet I have busybodies dictating what I can and can't do with it because its inside a national park boundary).

Ask away. We like it. Most of us here are addicted to GC, so fresh new posts are brilliant to us.

 

I'd go for Laurel. Dense, Evergreen, and grows pretty quickly once it gets going. Makes a great windbreak too, so would help if you want to establish things in the middle.

 

I'd go for Laurel too. It loves living among trees as well.

 

We planted it around an acre of two of young trees - mostly as a windbreak for them, and to keep deer out. Worked very well, and looks smashing now (30 years later ... although not my pad to enjoy any more :( )

 

Hmmm ... you could plant a wide double row and then take off all inward facing branches, over the years, to create an "Allee" as the stems will be creepy-shapes rather than dead straight. Like this:



although I think those may be Portugese Laurel, and I would suggest ordinary Laurel around your trees.

They've got some other quite cool features in that garden - La Ballue in Brittany - enough that I bought the book for some ideas to "borrow"

http://www.maison.com/jardin/jardins-visiter/jardins-ballue-7218/galerie/31596/

 

Wow, thanks for the replies , those Laurel look awesome!

I think what I might do is to up root all the smaller saplings from the wooded area and re-plant them in the edge, then I could take clueless1s' suggestion of Willow fedge for its rapid growth and plant between the trees. Then, if I can get them, I'll also put in some Laurels.

I was thinking of putting in some poles and using a bit of ivy too, or maybe spend a bit on some fencing poles and wire and try and encourage some creeping plants to use that.

Alas, I am not rich, far from it, so spending is going to be out of the question at least for the foreseeable future as I've just spent all my money on the land and I rent my house :(

The land is here in Devon, about 10 miles as the crow flies from Dartmoor. This is my first landscaping venture, I've only ever had house plants before and they don't do so well as I forget to water them most of the time but with the land nature should take care of that I'm guessing.

So just to come back to my original dilemma, the bracken, I think I'm going to pull up every last one of them by hand. If I do that (and lets say no spores can reenter my land through my 'hedge') If I then level the area with a digger and replant grass seed, is there any likelihood the bracken will grow back, if so, what could I do in my process to reduce the possibility of this occurring ? If pulled out by hand, does the root remain, could I remove them when digging over? Would it be better to cover the area with black tarpaulin to sap the energy from the plants and kill them once and for all?

PS, I found this, it looks just the ticket :

 

An option, price-wise, is to buy Cell-grown and then grow on in pots somewhere sheltered for a year, and then plant out that Autumn, or following Spring. (You can use "plastic bag" pots for a 1-time use at a cost effective price). If you have spare greenhouse space over winter (not including the Spring-rush!) I would over winter them/some in the greenhouse - it will bring them on more / faster the following spring and gain some growing time.

40-60cm cell grown are £0.60-ish each if you buy 100 or more, whereas if you buy 2L or 3L potted plants you will be looking at £2 each and larger sized plants (say 125/150cm) will be £10-15 each :(

You could risk planting the cell-grown straight out, but IME when planted that small they sit there and do nothing the first year, whereas potted and grown on they will be waist high when planting out the following year.

An acres is 64 metres square, and I reckon you would need about 2 plants per metre which would be 512 plants. Lay some weed suppressing membrane over the middle, then your 512 plants in pots for the first year, and then when you plant them out the membrane will have killed the bracken. Simples!!!

 

If you wait til winter before you plant or transplant any trees you should be ok. If you do it in summer you're going to have to thoroughly water them, and regularly, and that is most likely not practical over a large area.

 

Young hedge plants will need watering for the first year or two. They may survive if you don't (and if planted in the Autumn so they generate some roots before winter), but they won't grow very well and that will set them back and you will have some losses that you will have to replant - and they will be a year behind. All told it would be better to water them the first few years to prevent losses and establish them more quickly. I use leaky-hose for hedges - the hose "leaks" along its length, so you just lay it out very close to the stem of the young plants and connect it to the water supply for an hour or two, once or twice a week (more often during dry spells, once a week will do if you get modest rain). Could be that you get enough rain in Devon though? Suffolk is amongst the driest parts of the country.

 

Very good point. And not only does it seem to hurt more than it should for the size of the wound, but bracken cuts seem to me to take longer than they should to heal too.