garden help

Garden Edging, Garden Screening, Gardening, Gardens, Hedging, Liam, Planting, Plants

When is the best time to plant a hedge?

If you are planting an evergreen hedge the best time to plant is early autumn; if, however, you are planting a deciduous hedge the best time to plant is late autumn to late winter. Ensure that the ground is well prepared and is neither frozen nor waterlogged.

What is the fastest growing hedge?

Leyland Cypress ‘Leylandii’ hedges grows up to a meter every year but can be kept to any height given that it is trimmed once or twice a year. Cherry Laurel, Bamboo or Red Berberis are also fast growing hedges which also have unique aesthetics offering a range of beautiful screening.

How far apart do you plant a hedge?

How far you need to plant a hedge depends on the variety and ranges from 30cm (Privet) to 60cm (Leylandii) a part. To plant a double staggered row establish two parallel lines 30-50cm apart and then plant to the required distance for your chosen variety for an incredibly thick and healthy looking hedge.

What are the best hedges for screening?

The best hedges for screening which ensure the most privacy are all typically evergreen hedges; leylandii is a fantastic, fast-growing hedge that will give you splendid coverage in no time. Yew is also a classic and charming hedge for screening and although it isn’t as fast growing as the leylandii it is shade tolerant and will do extremely well in north-facing positions. The Common Holly ‘Ilex aquifolium’ is a splendid hedge for privacy with thick, vigorous growth remaining a beautiful shade of dark, gloss-green throughout the year also doubling up as an effective intruder deterrent.

Leyland Cypress (Leylandii)
Leyland Cypress (Leylandii)

What are the best hedges for front gardens?

There are a range of fantastic hedging plants for the front garden; Box (Buxus sempervirens) will form a brilliant neat small hedge to line path- and driveways while Yew will give you a more substantial hedge that can protect your home from roadside pollutants. Lavender also makes a wonderful, if unique hedge with the notorious purple flowers and rich fragrance.

What is the best hedge for a small garden?

The best hedges for smaller gardens are privet or osmanthus delavayii – two incredible hedges which grow thick and luscious in minimal amounts of space. Equally bamboos are a brilliant feature in the garden which also add an Asiatic charm to your garden.

What is the best hedge for wildlife?

For wildlife the best varieties of hedging plants are native species such as beeck, blackthorn, holly and hawthorn, all of which providing welcome shelter and food to our native animals. You can grow a wildlife hedge which consists of several of these native species in a single hedge with hawthorn being used as the base comprising around 60% of the hedge.

What is the best hedge?

The best hedge all depends entirely on what you want from your hedge; Box makes a brilliant neat little hedge to border pathways while leylandii is a spectacularly fast-growing evergreen sure to give you ample screening.  Equally there are flowering hedges such as Rhododendron or Lavender or fantastic native species including hawthorn and beech. Which hedging plant is the best depends on your vision for your outdoor space, as there’s such to be the perfect hedge to meet your needs.

Yew hedge
Yew hedge

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Liam at PrimroseLiam works in the buying team at Primrose. He is passionate about studying other cultures, especially their history. A lover of sports his favourite pastime is football, either playing or watching it! In the garden Liam is particularly interested in growing your own food.

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Gardening, Hiring Help in the Garden, Make over

Dex the digger, brought his mate Luke to work one day saying that he would share his wages with him, but needed, or perhaps he said wanted,  someone else to work with, I can’t quite remember. Well, pleased that the work would get done quicker, I insisted that Luke should be paid equal wages too.  Seeing two grown men working  for half wages did not sit right with me.  However, over the next few days, it did seem to be taking a long time to do these last bits of garden. work  Then the rain came, and came and came and came, so that when Dex and Luke came to work, they had to take shelter in the shed at frequent intervals. I was away for 3 days and left them to work, as I had done before when Dex worked alone. This time on my return however, there definitely did seem to be less work done than when Dex had been alone.  Did I smell a rat? Had it rained that much? Was I getting paranoid?   I pondered over the weekend, and decided to ask Dex to come to work early on Monday, without Luke.  I would then work with him most of the day myself. I rang on Sunday to arrange this, but couldn’t speak to Dex directly, leaving a message instead.  Early Monday came and went. Dex did arrive late morning with Luke, full of apologies.  Unfortunately his personal life had fallen apart that weekend and he had to travel from Kent that morning, from where he was now staying.  The cost was outrageous and accounted for most of his earnings that day. We all three worked in the garden till early afternoon and got most jobs finished and the place looking tidy.  The new turf had taken well and loved all the rain.  I had bought just the Cordyline I wanted and found the perfect place for it. But that was the last I saw of Dex and was left feeling very sad for him. I left thinking about the rest of the garden for another time.

      

Gardening, Hiring Help in the Garden, Make over

Whilst I was assessing what to do next, one of the people, who rang me last week in response to my advert at the job centre, called up to see if I wanted to try him out, I did. He came on Monday and turned out to be a great find.  Six foot two and as broad an ox, he wanted no tea or coffee, to start the day, but to get his hands on the spade and start digging, oh joy.  He laboured eagerly, still declining beverages, and began offering helpful suggestions which proved his gardening experience and knowledge.  The sun was shining and so was his forehead as he powered through the work.  He dug, sieved, cleared, swept and bagged the debris as he went, then loaded it into my car, so that it was an oddly satisfying  drive to the dump, as I was not filthy or exhausted by the work that had necessitated the trip. Back in the garden the work continued a pace, and still no beverages. I began to see that I could expand my original ideas for the space that needed revamping; I could be more ambitious because the work was not going to cost me my health.  I was just considering if I could adopt this chap, or marry him off to one of my daughters, when reality resurfaced and he had to leave early with a splitting headache.  I knew he should have had those beverages, it was dehydration I recon.

Wendy

Gardening, Hiring Help in the Garden, How To

Hiring help in the garden

The worn out section at the bottom of my garden

Faced again with the problem of needing manual labour, this time in the garden to give it a revamp, I pondered. Gardeners cost £10- £15 per hour where I live, but I often just need the muscle power to dig, shift and lift. Then I had a novel thought.

I tried contacting the local job centre to see if there were keen people available at a more economical sum. Sure enough, it was really easy to dictate my needs to the man on the phone, be given a reference number and signed, scanned and returned a document which guaranteed I would pay the minimum wage. There was no charge for this and within an hour I started to receive calls.  There were in fact so many calls for the £6.50 an hour job of heavy digging in my back garden, I had to call the job centre again to switch off the advert having agreed to one person and recording a back list of another 4 keen types.

Now, it was not a gardener I had hired, even though he professed to have done a fair amount of landscape gardening for a local council. He needed tutoring on how to dig up roots, rather than chopping them of at the surface; and I had to explain and that digging up a patch of ground containing rubble required penetrating the soil rather than scraping the turf from off the top of it. But that was what I was prepared for, and I did get a good chunk of the work done for a fraction of the price. Well, I did have to deflect the request for more funds as “the work had been really hard”.

So for £50 I got two sections of the garden cleared and felt encouraged to jet wash my large balcony as he had carried all the planters off it for me. They now sit at the bottom of the garden ready to be potted up with the spring display that I will see from my kitchen window. I will spend time this weekend assessing the next stage of work, and when the pots are ready, the top soil ordered, I will call up the numbers on my list, or re post my job centre ad and complete the next stage of the garden revamp.      Hoorah!    Watch this space.      Wendy

The side bed covered in the ivy I had got as far as dragging off the wall.  Can you imagine the amount of roots to dig up?