Hedging your bets (or betting your hedges)

Well sort of.  We sell a lot of plants each year and having only a few hundred of something popular tens to cause more trouble than it is worth - you sell out before the season has started and only end up upsetting people.

Well, we have been building our stock of blueberries to the point where we will at least last the month of November. Blueberries, of course, as “in” - they are amazingly healthy and given acid soil (post on the subject coming) they are wonderfully easy to grow.

Rabbits are a complete pain if you happen to grow hedging and trees and fruit for a living. Cute looking they may be, but they have a horrid habit of biting branches straight through (usually close to the stem) and of tearing leaves off plants they don’t bite…

Some hedging plants and trees produce suckers (new plants that grow up from the parent plant’s root system). Sometimes this is bad - because the sucker is the same as the rootstock, but not the tree as the plant is grafted. An example here would be a named rose variety that is grafted onto a dog rose rootstock.

Sometimes this is good - because you want a bushier plant. Rugosa roses make a bushier hedge because they sucker.

I suppose this should have started nearer the beginning - Ashridge Trees is our business. We grow and sell about 2 million shrubs and trees a year. We have a huge range of hedging plants and hedge shrubs. I suppose you could say we major on hedging. But we also grow and sell ornamental and fruit trees, and we have a widening range of soft fruit. Oh, nearly forgot - and just about every hedging related planting accessory you can think of.