More garden taking shape..Project Hedge

6 comments

after being away 5 days you realize how quickly things grow this time of the year.
i got a new supply of beautiful stones from the mountains to finish my path, which i did yesterday.

the best bit of gardening to me is the intimate knowledge of the plants which i have grown or just planted myself and seeing them develop on a daily basis.
i had never started a garden from scratch and was more of a just keeping things ticking over sort of gardener, always having so many other things to do.
here however the need for a garden was so great, on the top of a hill and very exposed, first of all the privacy aspect and second the weather and especially the wind aspect.
we decided a hedge would be a first priority.

writing this got me looking thr my pictures and i thought i would try to do a bit of a ‘before and after’ blog .

we started with just a field in december 2005

the first thing we did was become a member of a local conservation association who help with the planting of a natural hedge, consisting of local, wild plants and trees, and also with a grant towards it. which was very wellcome as we needed about 400 saplings.

planting local species benefits wildlife, especially as quite a few of the original field hedges had been taken out.
our neighbour came to help with his tractor and the local man from the association came with his machine to roll out and bury the plastic in which we would plant our ‘hedge’ trees.
he showed us the technique and we then spend a cple of days on our knees planting…… and planting!
the plastic had to stay in position for 5 years, then it had to be taken out which my husband finished this spring, during this time no watering, feeding of any plants was needed or allowed!!

i couldnt believe this would actually work as we often have months without a drop of rain and high temperatures in summer.
you can just see how tiny the saplings were, very tricky not to get them mixed up when planting.

taking this plastic up was no job for the fainthearted as everything had grown over and through the layer of plastic and as the hedge is knitting together nicely, so had the roots and grass.
this was a real man job!

this is what the hedge looks like today, i have pruned most of them twice yearly and they have thickened out nicely, we lost maybe 8 or 9 plants which were replaced, we got a surplus anyway
some of the trees are now about 4 m high already.

we also planted about a dozen fig trees as part of the hedge, all of them old varieties which are not sold anymore and they gave us a lot of figs already last year, those which the dog didnt have first!

• 6 Apr, 2011
• 2 likes

More blog posts by resi