One of the hardest and slowest ways of making money must be in cultivating hawthorn quicks, or plants, from the haw - a fruit that humans don't eat, and that birds tend to leave while there are juicier things around, like blackberries. To grow these hawthorn quicks, according to one written source, you store the haws in sand in a box, covering layer after layer with the sand. About November, according to this formula, you then rub off the pulp from the seed - no easy task. You then sow one inch deep in a seed bed and, the following October, transplant the bigger seedlings to where they are to grow. The rest can be moved the next year. That's from the Field Book of Country Queries, published over forty years ago.
It sounds very much of a short cut according to a landscaper friend who recently provided hundreds of quicks, grown in the following way. The haws are piled into a clamp, like potatoes, in ridge formation, straw above and beneath and the whole covered with earth. Not the following spring but the one after that, you take them up and plant out on flat beds, covering lightly with soil. You keep the beds weed free and then in autumn you line out the biggest and best. But it will probably be another year before your plants are ready for the market, and they will be even more saleable the following year.
A few hundred bought recently by a friend may have been even three years in the seedbed, for they were very well rooted, sturdy and two and a half to three feet high. Of all the safe fences there is surely none to beat the thorn, well looked after and not allowed to grow too leggy.
Of course, the hawthorn may be left to grow into a tree, and handsome it can be, while its wood is dense and heavy. Excellent fuel after a year or two. It is said in The Tree Book by Edward Milner that haws have been used to make jellies, wines, liqueurs and ketchups. Never come across these, though the flowers could well be, like elders, used in wine making.
N.B. Quick in this sense has nothing to do with speed, obviously. It is quick - meaning alive. "Medicine is able to quicken a rock", Shakespeare.