How To Manage a New Mixed Native Hedge
I wanted to put together a quick guide to the initial management regime for a recently planted mixed native hedge, although to be honest there's not much to it.
You planted your new hedge plants as 60-90cm tall whips a year or so ago. You popped some guards on them and mulched with wood chip. Your new hedge should be looking pretty good, although growth will have been influenced by things like available sunlight - this one is in part shade next to an oak. Some species establish much quicker than others; roses race away, but plants like Blackthorn are much slower. Don't worry - they'll catch up.
The first thing to do is to weed the hedgeline, removing grasses in particular which have appeared through the mulch. Here the weed of choice is snowberry, which will take a determined campaign to get rid of! Most likely it's an idea to top up the mulch when you've finished, which I'll be doing here.
Guards
Then check the guards. If they're fully biodegradable there's no need to remove them as they should just disintegrate. If they're not - and historically they won't be - even after just a year some plants will be big enough that they won't need them. Here the major enemy is voles rather than rabbits or hares, so I'm more relaxed about removing them. Ballpark, take them off after a couple of years. The plastic ones can be recycled or re-used.
Why do they need removing? For two reasons. First off, the plants won't be able to grow lateral branches close to the ground. I've shamelessly nicked this photo from PTES (thoroughly recommend for this stuff) to illustrate the problem:
The guards left on this stretch of hawthorn hedge have meant there's a bare patch at its base. This might not look disastrous, but it has BIG consequences for mice, voles, hedgehogs etc trying to toddle down it in safety.
The other issue with not removing guards is that you end up with weirdly mangled plants, with limbs tightly clutched around their main stems. Not great. You might have noticed the same kind of thing in planted woodland when guards haven't been removed quickly enough. In a hedge, this is going to mean the individual plants don't spread out naturally.
To Prune Or Not to Prune?
The main question people seem to have relates to pruning. By and large they seem very keen to. I'm not sure it matters much, to be honest. If some of the quicker growing hedge plants are looking tall but leggy then yes, why not. Some nurseries even recommend pruning your hedge plants when you plant them. Whenever you take out a plant's leader you're going to encourage it to bush out. En masse this is going to mean a thicker hedge.
I guess the main reason I'm not too fussed about this is that I know that I'm going to lay the hedge anyway, so it doesn't matter. It's going to be super dense whatever I do to the plants at this stage.
If you're working in a small space, then obvs prune your hedge to suit. Important to mention, these are tough plants - you physically can't do them terminal harm, whatever you do (almost whatever!).
If a plant is struggling it's worth cutting the leader to see if it's still green - i.e. viable. Hedge plants are unlikely to fail completely and often you'll see regrowth from their base. In a way this is a good thing as you're effectively coppicing it - you'll end with something that's multi-stemmed!