Wind break

So far this year, we have made some big changes to our originally bare garden.  New fencing, conifers, compost heaps, new plants, bamboo screening, an archway and new shed, not to mention the wife's chickens.  These are the first things we started doing with the blank canvas.  Not all of the above are finished.  Some are works in progress based on time and financial constraints.

I'll touch on all these things in my blogs, i'm sure.

In this post i'll start with the conifers.

Our house is in a small village and set at the end of a cul de sac over looking fields.  The view is beautiful and for our first and hopefully only home, it is more than we could have ever wished for.  In the nine months that we have lived here, we have seen winter, spring and the summer and so have seen the majority of what our garden has to offer. 

One of the very first things we noticed about our garden was that we get no shelter from the weather.  Being the second to last house on our road, and with the neighbours and our fencing both being low, the back garden gets whatever comes over the fields.

So, our project in our garden came in the format of creating some sort of wind break on the left hand side of our garden.

We looked at several options, the first of which was fencing.  We did a bit of research into prices and found that to fence right down to the bottom of our garden would cost us in excess of £400/ £500 as it is a shared boundary and we were looking at £900 for the lot.  This was something we couldn't consider.  Having moved in to a house that needed some modernisation, we couldn't justify this sort of an amount.  Plus the upkeep of staining the wood every year or two.

So we decided on a more natural wind break.  Shrubs were considered, but with many having some sort of berries on and us having small children who would be tempted to eat said berries, we opted for conifers.

As I said in the last post, we have a conifer hedge seperating the garden, but this is a dark green cultivar of conifer.  We decided to go for a brighter colour and fast growing type, so opted for Gold Leylandii 'Castlewallan'.  As we needed so many, we bought in bulk from a garden centre, and chose three foot high ones.  These set us back around £100.  Admittedly this is not an instant windbreak, but there's less care needed, as for several years they will be left to grow, and in the future only a trim will be needed every year to keep them in check.

We would much rather look at plants than fencing or walls and with these conifers we will have some colour in the garden in winter.

When they were first planted, the conifers turned very golden brown.  At first we were worried that we'd lost them all, but by April/May time, the colour improved after a feed of blood fish and bone and now they are a beautiful golden green and looking very healthy.

Over the next few years they will grow and make an excellent wind break and give some privacy to our garden.