Planting Hedging Through Mulch Fabric

In our multi-award winning epic bareroot native hedge planting video, we demonstrate this sequence:

1. Laying the woven mulch fabric on the ground
2. Cutting slits in it
3. Planting through those slits

English Style: Lay Mulch Before Planting

But if that feels wrong for you, you can try doing it the Irish way, which has the distinct advantage of being so different.

Irish Style: Plant Before Laying Mulch

This hedge planting video by Northern Ireland’s Environmental Farming Scheme starts off familiar, out in the field.

• We love the soil preparation effort, broken ground is easy for roots to spread through.
• A lot of people would use a weedkiller, scalp the plants off the soil only, or smother the weeds by pinning down a double row (i.e. approx 2m wide) of mulch fabric one growing season prior, perhaps starting paperwork for a grant.

Things get interesting at 1:50 mins in when they start laying the mulch fabric over the top of the newly planted and hard pruned hedge:

Then they cut little holes for each plant at the right place, which looks fiddly, then push the fabric down over them:

Weighing down the mulch fabric

Wow, Ireland don’t do half measures, man:

This persistent gravel mulch over the plastic fabric is a “red carpet” for hedge roots that will

• Improve soil water absorption & retention, greatly increasing soil life & fertility
• Prevent fabric flapping in the wind
• Skirt up around the base of the plants to prevent weeds where it matters most!

This level of care is usually given to your gardens, or a prime business park.
Gravel is a great solution here. The soil underneath has been dug already, so plastic ground pegs won’t work, and good luck tucking the edges in without yanking your plants every which way.

So Which Way Is Best To Plant Your Hedge?

We have never tried the Irish way, so this is our humble opinion: the Irish way of painstakingly laying down the mulch fabric one bespoke hole at a time, all while carefully squatting over the work you’ve just done without squashing it, looks like a right pain in the neck, back, and another region.

The English way requires more to-ing and fro-ing along the row to prepare the mulch fabric with planting slits, but that time has to be easily recouped by the ease of the planting process.
There is no fiddliness with wiggling the hedge stubs through the mulch and constantly pulling the fabric tight to keep it straight. But the Irish are world renowned fiddlers, so they are.

Weighing down the hedge with gravel is a classic case of “if you’ve got it laying around, may as well use it, otherwise it’s not worth it, unless it’s on the grant money, you see, in which case it’s impolite not to use it as intended”.

Backseat Tip 1: Keep Soil Off Mulch

This hedge is being planted with 8 trees per 100 metres, which complicates things a bit because they have to be planted through a hole in the fabric.
In the video, they had already applied gravel mulch, which is not ideal because you end up with lots of this:

Mud all over your nice gravel mulch makes gravelly mud, which will grow weeds right away.

Backseat Tip 2: How to drop your secateurs on the wrong side of a barbed wire fence

We are totally unsponsored by Spider Tool Holster, who haven’t given us a rotten nickel for passing on that their key ring or water bottle gripper, plus their signature holster, are dead handy for holding most models of snips where you can slip out the spring to insert the spider tool ring in the space under the hinge; if that’s not possible on your model, it won’t work.