Tim Watts wrote:
Martin Brown
wibbled on Tuesday 20 April 2010 16:05


Are there likely to be any problems with my top 3 choices so far:

Box,

The prunings of box are an irritant after a short while fermenting.

Hmm.

Yew,

Yew is poisonous in all parts. Not a good choice on a field boundary.
Both of the above are rather slow growing.

Just to clarify - this is a garden, not a field, so I don't anticipate
anything eating it. The kids are bright enough not to eat random things
(I've already lecturered then on mushrooms and berries).

Ah. Now I have been eating the most alarming-looking mushrooms since I
was ten or eleven, gradually widening my menu as books came into my
possession. I'm now seventy, and still living, though my gills are
drying-up - and as for my stalk...

Also, I'm a collector of berries - don't despise them.

However, get to know what you can eat, be sure of your identifications,
and then teach the kids what you've learnt. They'll develop (probably) a
healthy interest and it will serve them right^h^h^h^well.

So few people these days know what wild foods you can use, and if I
hadn't (and been a good shot) I could have starved or turned to crime
when the DWP took two and a half years thinking about paying me my
pension...

Mushrooms of many sorts, berries, fat hen and other chenopods, ground
elder, nettles, young hogweed shoots, what I grew in the garden, sloes,
bullaces, blackberre, black nightshade, pigeons, rabbits, (grey)
squirrels, and lots more, with a bit of gleaning after harvest.
Admittedly, I lost a lot of weight, but I don't think I took any harm
from it.

Most years I make a few pots of pie-filling from black nightshade
berries. (Solanum nigrum) I regularly eat a mushroom which most of the
books have as poisonous (Lactarius torminosus) which must be boiled 'at
a gallop' for ten minutes before preparing for frying, etc,

I'd recommend 'Food For Free' for the plants, and Roger Phillips'
Mushrooms and Other Fungi of Great Britain and Europe to begin with.

Beech.

Nice appearance and the golden brown leaves stay on in the winter. It is
a slight martyr to whitefly in some years.

You should also consider cotoneaster (deciduous) but fairly dense.
Loicera nitida is fairly well behaved as a hedge.

Thanks - I'll check those out on the web shortly.

I'd also have holly and pyracantha if I was starting from scratch, but
you say you don't like spiky things. I'd also be tempted to put crab
apple, rosa rugosa and blackthorn in as well.

I have a blackthorn and a holly tree. The blackthorn is at least high enough
that it doesn't splat me in the face (or the pedestrians - I was getting
complaints via the Parish Council about my 10' hawthorn, having just taken
over the property - it had to come down, total pain to trim). I did keep
one bit of hawthorn at the other end that's also more of a tree - thought
they'd be a feature - one tree at each end of the hedge plus the
blackthorn.

Wounds from blackthorn spines tend to fester and go septic - beware of
having any within reach of the general public.

Actually, I don't mind holly - it prickles but doesn't slash your skin to
bits. It's rose, hawthorn and blackthorn I find have objectionable spikes.

As an anklebiter at boarding school, the game in Dorm 22 was to leap out
of the window into the holly hedge below, and land on our backs - in our
pyjamas...

Dogood is a good hedge plant, and the red branches in the winter are
rather decorative, The berries are poisonous, though I've never heard of
them doing serious harm.

If ou do decide on some box, cuttings root very readily, aan you can
soon have enough to hide the Great Wall of China if you try hard enough.

--
Rusty