The Other Half gets stuck in. We spent the morning planting hawthorn, sweet briar and dog rose along the fence that leads in from Western Road. To keep the weeds and grass down, the plants were heavily mulched with spruce chippings that have been rotting down for a year.
The Wee ‘Un always loves the opportunity to wield his spade and was quick to help with digging out the pile of spruce chippings.
The Other Half and the Wee ‘Un with the finished line of hawthorn, briar and dog rose. Once the plants are about five feet high, they’ll be laid into a hedge and the remaining spruce will be taken out. A few Scots pine will then be planted behind the hedge, where they’ll be sheltered from the wind until they are mature in about 40 years time.
See, I look at this post, and I think, “Man, I can’t plan for Monday, let alone 40 years time.” And I know I should - my lad will be 40 one day and I want him to have a world to grow into. We’re getting there. Any thoughts on Green Cones, for those of us in the deepest of dark suburbia?
Forty years is medium term. Our long-term trees are oaks and juniper - both of which will be coming along nicely in 80 to 100 years time. Read my next post about planting juniper - I find it quite exciting to plant trees that won’t flower until 10-12 years old and won’t reach their full potential for 100 years.
Yo ! Stonehead. Further down the bigger island everyone in blog land is doing this tagging thing. I got tagged this week and have responded. Thought you might like to be the recipient of this bag of tags I seem to have been landed with.
Five meme’s, wry, witty or weird.
Then tag others. Five preferably, but who is counting ?
Like your blog by the way.
Tagging? Now I’ll have to Google to find out what you’re talking about, but it sounds like the web equivalent of chain emails. Shudder!
Okay, I’ve done my research and the answer is no, I have no inclination to play meme tag (I’m supposed to list five things about me that relate to the “memes” and then tag five more people with them).
If you want to know something about me, read the blog. If I want to know something about someone else I’ll either ask them or read their blog.
And as for “meme” tag, I guess it appears cool and trendy to many but to me it’s as annoying and over-played as all those chain emails that get strangled by my carefully tailored spam filter.
Oh, and whoever came up with the idea that wry, witty and weird are memes clearly doesn’t know what a meme is! A meme is a unit of cultural information that can be transferred from one mind to another.
In other words, a meme could be a catchy tune, an ad jingle, a catch-phrase, a fashion concept, a commonly repeated design, or the like. Adjectives such as wry, witty or weird are not memes.
Mutter, mutter. I suppose I should get a slot on Grumpy Old Men now…
Good for you Stoney (re: memes) - bloody useless waste of time!
As for the trees - GREAT! Did you prep the ground first, or just cut slits? I have a native hedge to plant and need all the advice I can get.
When planting bare-rooted trees, the ideal is to clear away the grass for at least a metre around the tree, cut a slot with a spade, plant the tree through weed fabric and then mulch heavily to keep the weeds down.
The lack of competition from grass and weeds gives the tree a major headstart.
However, when you’re planting a lot of trees, then you’ll have to make compromises due to the constraints of both cost and time.
When planting a hedge, we remove a turf strip 20 inches wide and the full length of the hedge. We then cut slots at 18-inch intervals (for a single line of plants, double or triple lines of plants have different spacings) and plant into these, before mulching the whole length.
Weed fabric is too expensive to use on a long line of hedge, but you could use something like black silage wrap. As this is impervious to water, you need to dish this down around each plant so that they are watered by rain.
If mulching without fabric or plastic, you’ll need to do a bit more weeding and re-mulching each year.
Once you’ve got the plants in, they should be pruned back to encourage new growth and then pruned hard for the first five years or so. We prune out a third of each year’s new growth. At five years you should be looking to lay the hedge for the first time, depending on how well it has grown.
Make sure you fence the hedge with rabbit wire - rabbits love hawthorn, blackthorn, hazel and holly. They’ll even eat dog rose and sweet briar if they’re hungry enough.