Free Cherry Laurel Bushes When You Do It Your Self

in #gardening4 years ago

One of the most expensive things when you have your own home is marking our your boundaries, a fence for our property would cost into the thousands to have put up.

But, with a little time and effort you can just like me have a nice hedge going around your property for just about free, let me explain.

Me and my neighbour found a hedge that we like, it is the Cherry Laurel bush, we have seen them growing around a new build estate near where we live.

The leaves are a deep green and in a short amount of time they have grown to make a nice hedge that makes the new build stand out.

We have a area that needs either fencing of or covering, this is because the builders who have been working on the house up from ours have left the land in such a state that both of us just don't want to see it.

We looked into buying the amount of bushes that we would need, and for one bush we can get them for £4.50 each so ten bushes that would be £45 and a hundred would be £450.

Hedges are cheaper than a fence, but still way out of our price range.

An idea came to mind, why not propagate our own cuttings and grow our own bushes to go around the area we want to section off.

Now there is no way on this planet that a garden centre would give us cuttings, so I decided to do something that would give me some money and give me the cuttings that I needed.

I went out and cut pruned some bushes that where the ones we were looking for, and I charged the customer for doing the job too.

I then took the clippings back to my house and made a start on taking the cuttings from them.

20200318_162224.jpg

It is pretty easy to do, all you have to do is take a stem that you have cut and cut it to about 5" long and remove all but one leaf, the leaf you have to cut in half so that not to much moisture is lost from the plant while the roots are forming.

I took 95 cuttings in total, some went in a plastic container that I have recycled, it has a broken base, I have used a mix of compost and sand to make the right medium for the cutting to grow in.

20200318_162242.jpg

20200318_162240.jpg

and in another tall standing pot I have normal compost that has 15 cuttings in, both have had rooting hormone on the stems to help with growth of the roots, I would have used honey like I normally do but with the out break at the moment there isn't any on the shop shelves.

20200318_162214.jpg

20200318_162212.jpg

I have watered them and added the lid to them and now I will leave them for a few months and see if any roots come through.

Years ago, my dad did it the same way around my mums house and got 100% success from every cutting.

The rest of the leafs will go on my compost pile and be broken down so everything will be used.

So if your looking for a cheap, if not free way to grow some hedge for an area that you need to box off then this is a way that you can do it.

It sometimes is all about doing it yourself.

The only thing about growing cuttings is the waiting time for them to grow roots and grow new stems and leafs, but when they do they will look amazing.

stay safe guys and until next time.

Sort:  

Thanks for sharing your creative and inspirational post!



This post got curated by our fellow curator @rehan12 and you received a 100% upvote from our non-profit curation service!

Join the official DIYHub community on steem and show us more of your amazing work!

Very clever and very constructive.

Thank you for using the recommended tag/s. This post has been manually rewarded with BUILD tokens in the form of an upvote. You can buy, stake, and exchange our "BUILD" tokens for steem on steem engine or SteemLeo

Build-it is a central hub for DIY and How-To projects. It's an opportunity to find and share the latest in DIY, and How-To tutorials. The recommended tags required when creating a DIY article are #diy, #build-it. #how-to, or #doityourself. Please subscribe to our community here

Chat with us on our discord and telegram channels Discord, Telegram.

Follow @build-it for more updates!