Betting on my Hedge

 On Sunday morning Beth and I drove to Bloomers Nursery to select something for the garden. A couple of months ago I dug up a lavender bush which frankly neither of us liked, and this left a bit of a bare area in front of our porch. My ideas was a small evergreen hedge, and Beth couldn't come up with anything she liked better so that was the plan. On my previous visit to Bloomers (for the apple tree) I'd spotted a couple of pallets of evergreens that would work, labelled $2.50 each, and a sign saying 50% off. $1.25 for a small evergreen seemed like a bargain, so after a wander round the nursery to examine their stock and enjoy the sunshine we loaded up 16 on a cart and went to pay.

It turned out they'd already taken the 50% off so the plants were $2.50 each. Hmm, to me that's false advertising, but we decided to put 4 back and get 12 for the hedge.

I lined up the plants beforehand to see how the spacing would work. Just as well we only got 12, as 16 would have been too many. I tried digging a hole for the first one with a spade, but soon discovered that a claw tool to loosen the earth followed by a trowel to fetch it out worked better. On my hands and knees, with a foam mat for knee padding, I set to.

 An hour or so and a couple of mugs of tea later, all twelve are planted. I judged the line purely by eye, and I think it came out as good as could be hoped. Even if I'd laid a string line and dug holes at fixed spacings, the variation between the plants would have prevented a 100% uniform line. There's loose topsoil down to about eight inches, beneath which there is clay~ish soil and pebbles. I had to did a little way into the clay each time, but hopefully the topsoil is deep enough for happy plants.

By 3pm the hedge is in full sunlight, which it will get until sunset. I wanted evergreens as they should do better in this, the shadiest area in the garden, barring the north side of the house around the toolshed which is a loose pebble surface with nothing planted anyway. This is a dwarf variety, and should retain a rounded shape for each plant, while not growing too tall. I'm hoping they'll grow together over time, but even like this I think they look good.