Teddy’s Garden: Creating a wildlife hedge

Hello and welcome back to my blog!

Today’s post shows you some more progress made in Teddy’s Garden over the last week.

If you’ve been following and reading my recent posts, you’ll know that the Mr and I recently moved the old compost pile from Teddy’s Garden to the new compost bays in The Woodland Garden. When we did this, I discovered a large pile of hedge and shrub prunings that had barely decomposed:

I set those aside in Teddy’s Garden as best I could and organised them, though I knew that I needed to sort them out due to the huge amount of space taken up. Within that pile, there was also a huge pile of honeysuckle vines, left over from when I removed the clump from the right-side of The Wild Borders earlier this year:

I already had set in my mind that we would create a hedge for wildlife, also known as a dead hedge. This would be to primarily benefit wildlife, but also offer a barrier for the space and also a windbreak for my greenhouse!

Constructing the dead hedge couldn’t have been simpler and was completed in one afternoon. I simply marked out the area where the vertical stakes were going to go:

Then the Mr made pilot holes in the ground with a metal rod, and then inserted various prunings we were using as vertical stakes for holding the hedge together:

These prunings were ones I had put to one side in their own pile, as they were either nice and straight with few curves or bends, and they were also thicker and therefore stronger to serve as uprights.

I then started adding the sticks to the hedge, using some of the straighter clippings to weave the edge like a wattle fence. It had rained in the previous day and night, so the sticks had been slightly softened and were easy to weave with. For the vine pile, I simply chopped this up with hedge trimmers and added bits of it in as I created the hedge:

After it was completed, the hedge really helped to define the space and was surprisingly sturdy!

I left various dried flower heads in situ, as I liked how wild and rustic it looked:

I used up all of the pile of sticks and vine cuttings in the hedge. Over time, it will settle and it can be topped up with any hedge cuttings every year. For now, it is great to see Teddy’s Garden taking shape!