Guide to Planting a Hedge Garden

Well-planted hedges can provide wonderful solutions to several different gardening needs. They can offer privacy, cover up unsightly spots and lend appeal to those hard to cultivate areas. Join our gardening expert as he discusses the basics of planting a hedge and sheds light on the various likes, dislikes and requirements of hedge plants.

Hi there, this is Scott from Spring Hill Nurseries. Today, I'm going to show you how to plant a hedge. The plant that we're going to use today is Spring Hill's Red Freedom hedge rose. These are beautiful plants. They're maintenance free, pest free, disease free. They are wonderful for a hedge. What we're going to do is, I'm going to show you step-by-step how to plant a hedge and you can use this for any hedge variety of plants, not just these hedge roses. There are many different reasons and locations where you can plant a hedge - a nice backdrop for your yard, to cover something that's maybe not so pretty. Here, we're going to do both. We're going to get some privacy by planting along the fence, and we're going to cover up this fence that's not really that attractive. Check your plant's information for spacing. Ours is three feet, so, I've got one here, we're going to go three feet, approximately three feet, there! A commonly used planting technique for shrubs is trenching. Basically, what you'd do is, you'd dig a whole trench and put each plant in it. Now because the spacing varies from plant to plant, that may not always be feasible. Since I'm going to be three foot here apart with my hedge roses, I'm not going to dig a trench all the length of all five of these plants. I'm just going to dig a hole for each one. It's going to be about a foot wider than the width of the root ball and then about as deep as it is in this pot. If you've got something that's going to be planted closer together, then, by all means, please dig a trench. You're going to get better soil that way and you'll be able to handle the weeds in between better. The hole is dug. It's approximately a foot wider than the root mass, but I'm not just going to stick it right in. First, I'm going to pre water the hole. What that does is, it helps get the water to the roots coz that's really important, as we know. You're going to give it a real good watering, let it soak in. We'll do it again, let it soak in and then we'll plant the rose. The water has soaked in, now it's time to place the plant in the hole. You want to keep this here at the soil line, same as it came in the pot, and I've got some real good, crumbly soil that I'm going to put in and what that's going to do is it's going to help get soil contact with the roots which is important. Then I'm going to spread the roots a little bit, make sure these roots get out. We're going to make sure we get that good contact between the roots and the soil. That's really, really important. I filled the original soil back around the plant, now it's time to mulch. You want to give it about a two to three-inch layer. So, we've planted all five of our Red Freedom hedge roses. I put some mulch down in between each one just to keep the weeds down in between. That's all there is to it. We're going to have a beautiful privacy screen here, up against our fence. For step-by-step gardening, I'm Scott. Thanks for watching.