Hedging your bets (or betting your hedges)

As I have mentioned before, the Dastardly Dursley’s of Harry Potter fame have done not a little damage to the street cred of the Ligustrum family.  Privet Drive is no longer as attractive an address a it once was and some muggles seem to think that privet is out of fashion. 

Well, not with wizards its not. Apart from being an outstanding wandmaking wood, Privet has a few other magical qualities of its own.  Young Jasper (aged 10) from next door stumbled across one of them when in the garden just before Christmas and just before the freeze.

Tags: Privet

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.

Tags: blueberries

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.