Hedge Clipping 22

Southern Water Biodiversity Grant funded - Hedging Our Future Project

Project coming to an end but the job isn't finished!

This Southern Water funded 2-year project to plant hedges across the peninsula is finishing at the end of the month. Thank you to them and their Biodiversity Fund for supporting our valuable work and making this an easy grant to manage and deliver.

In our first year we worked in Highleigh on Mapsons Farm and put in a hedge totalling 800 metres which improved 1500 metres of hedgeline. We were greatly helped by the farmer and despite the challenging weather planted 5505 trees. We had between 3 and 12 volunteers and carried out 12 planting sessions with a 3-acre new piece of woodland created at the end.

During the second year we focussed on South Mundham with between 3 and 13 volunteers helping during the 20 sessions. We also had different businesses and groups completing green community days out join us and this included the amazing staff from Waterhaven residential home, a team from Target in Selsey, 2 different teams from the EA and helpers from Transition Chichester. We have planted 3967 trees to date creating 858 metres of new hedging both sides of a footpath and into an adjacent field. We hope to do a bit more over the next couple of weeks.

The success of the project has been down to the number of committed volunteers that have come out week after week to plant trees and support the project aims. This is your win and your legacy.

While we have managed to plant two new hedges, there is still much more to do on the peninsula as this intensely farmed agricultural land has very large open fields with areas devoid of hedges. We hope to gain more grants to continue planting up new sites and already have farmers queuing up. After the FLOW project we identified about 350 kilometres of missing hedges so we have lots more to do!

Thank you to all the people that came out recently to South Mundham and helped to plant the trees, barrow and spread the mulch, carry the heavy bags of trees, guards and stakes many hundreds of metres to site, and generally be super helpful and cheery in some very challenging weather. The first year we had a spontaneous wild swimmer explore an adjacent ditch but this year there were no nearby water bodies so no distractions! The MWHG just have the best volunteers!