The northern boundary of the front yard is unmarked and somehow looks unfinished, particularly with the front hedgerow in place. Last year we used cuttings from the mulberry tree woven in between cut off tomato stakes to make a wattle fence and it looked pretty darn good. While it was made out of home produced and recycled materials it did only last one year and by the autumn was bug eaten and looking pretty crappy. Another problem was that recycled or not, it still didn’t actually produce anything so it was time for a re-think.
After considerable thought my lovely partner in crime suggested that a lavender hedge would be just the thing and being soft and fragrant it wouldn’t cause any problems for our neighbours either. It would also produce lavender blossom and attract bees to the yard, so a lavender hedge it would be!
To start out I measured out the distance and ran a string line (made using a couple of sticks as stakes with the string wrapped around them) along one side of where the hedge was to go, then using a reasonably sharp spade I made a series of cuts into the lawn along the length of the string line to form one continuous cut. That done, I moved the string line over by half a metre and then did the same thing on that side so that I had two parallel cuts in the grass along each side of where the hedge was to go.
In the way of the hedge was the elderberry “tree”, I used the inverted commas because it was a pretty scrappy and pathetic looking specimen. I had planted several sambucus canadensis (American Elderberry) plants years ago with the idea of producing berries and making a hedge, but all it did was send out suckers all over the place and not produce any berries. This was the last remaining remnant of that idea. The flowers are of some use so some of the material I dug out went into a pot for further consideration but by and large, everything in the way of the lavender had to go.
With the bed for the hedge marked out, I used my trusty mattock to dig out all the grass between the two cuts, this took considerably longer (the grass is buffalo and thick!) and was somewhat less fun that I envisaged but after a couple of hours the job was done. The next trick was to provide edging so that the lavender had a raised bed to grow in, they like good drainage and grow well in that environment and the one in our herb spiral has gone berserk.
To match the front garden we got some semicircular wooden logs wired together on end as a border, but they do have a tendency to fall outward under pressure of the growing medium the bed gets filled with. To prevent this we cut some stakes from the mulberry tree thinning and I hammered then in every metre or so around the inside of the border and then wired the border logs to the stakes.
As growing medium to fill it with, a mate can get mushroom compost free from where he works (a mushroom farm, funny that!) and half a ute later, the bed is full up. For the lavender plants themselves, we wanted French lavender like the one in the herb spiral, and given my druthers, I would have propagated my own from that bush, but that would have taken some time. Instead we got a good deal on a stack of 100mm pots of lavender from a local nursery and planted them. Before the weather gets too hot I’ll mulch the beds as well to reduce evaporation and keep the roots cooler.
The hedge is started and it will take a couple of years to make a full scale hedge, but when it does it will provide lavender flowers and trimmings for use in things like teas and potpourri as well as in cooking and even perhaps for extracting essential oils from.
