"D Russell" wrote in
:

It still takes a long time.

I lay my own garden hedges, but you'd need a lot of time and/or help
available to maintain all the hedges on a small farm that way: most
people won't have that, and will at most lay the odd one which has
been particularly neglected and needs thickening up, relying on a
mechnical cutter to do the rest.


Surely there's also an economy of scale, type thingy, I mean if you
lay a hedge well it won't need doing again for 10 years, but if you
trim it you have to trim it every year.

Ten *years*?

You must have very undernourished hedges! My mixed/hazel hedges would be
lines of well-established trees (and far too big to lay) if untrimmed for
that long.

I agree that you don't need to lay a hedge every year, but you do still
need to trim it if you are going to keep it as a hedge, not a small area of
woodland!