[elibump]

Gosh 8doubles, and I thought I was doing badly on my 3rd glass of red wine!!!!

Carolyn xx

[8doubles]

You don`t say what size the glass is  Indiana Jones would struggle to get across some allotment sites without losing body parts 

[Stree]

For goodness sake just plant your stuff further away from the hedge !  Have you ever had a good look at the soil around the base of a privet? Its poor and dusty and the rain does not get there much. and its full of fine roots, lots near the surface and lots further down. You cannot just tidy up and organise and position plants like ornaments on a mantlepiece, using scrap iron fibreglass, plastic sheets etc to "separate" growing areas as if you are putting the hedge and the veg into individual pots ! and it will look awful...
I am amazed and not a little disappointed that not one "gardener" here has failed to take the bait and seen the folly of the proposition, (* Exceptions below) but instead have joined in adding to the endless list of rubbish to put in the soil, no doubt to remain there forever until it becomes a hazard, and the veg will never do well there, and the hedge will have a good proportion of its roots hacked of in the process . There will be no winner in such a situation. Ruined hedge and  mediocre at best veg crop. and probably a gardener with a cut from the material used as a divider that turns really nasty like wounds in the garden often do.
If you really absolutely have to plant so close to the hedge then use growbags, containers, dustbins, raised beds  etc etc.but for goodness sake work with nature and not against it..



*
8doubles makes a valid point against the proposition.

[Knoblauch]

Good points, but I don't want to plant RIGHT up to the hedge, which will be hacked back pretty-well to the centreline too (it's a party hedge).  The bed is about 4ft wide and when I removed the weed fabric the roots had ingressed by nearly half of that, sapping up all the nutrients as they spread too I daresay.  The hedges are very old and if they die I don't care as it's the neighbour that wants to maintain 2.5m hedges that block off the morning sun.

Doing this will also help keep slugs away if they have to climb over something - it could really be a sort of raised bed reinforced with timber over time.  And whatever physical build other contributors might be which would cause them to have nasty accidents with such a setup I'm nimble and light and certainly wouldn't regard the daily gardening round as being as accident-prone as teetering in plimsolls over razor-sharp corals at the seaside, which is what it's being made to sound like. 

[8doubles]

I am growing some veg right next to a  privet hedge

Light and nimble but not consistent .......

[Knoblauch]

OK - I've just been and measured it.

From the centre of the hedge to the path is 6ft.  I have planted veg 4ft from the path inwards.

What I don't want is to dig the bed over at the end of the season and find the roots have proliferated inwards again; thus I'm aiming to tranche them out while leaving plenty of room (ca 18") for the hedge to co-exist peaceably with its neighbours.  Sounds fair enough?

[Stree]

Right, lets have another go:

You say the hedge is 2.5 mtrs, so converting that to Imperial, lets say its  about 8 foot ish.
Up until about 2 years ago I had a garden with about 140 foot of 9 foot tall privet hedge.A very old hedge, but very healthy.  Parts of this hedge were about 3 foot thick, this was the section that was entirely inside my own property. Nothing would grow under this apart from the odd chickweed. Anything else that needed a root developed more than say 3" just didn`t make it. The soil was compacted and parched, interlaced with fine roots and on one side at least shaded for most of the day. So about 2 feet either side of this hedge was just soil. More like dust actually.
The rest of the hedge  adjoined a neighbours garden, and this was about 2`6" thick and same again, nothing would grow there except very hardy weeds. Not that they really tied, just the odd straggler.
Privet is not a greedy plant but it will survive where most things will not. When did you hear of anyone feeding or mulching a privet hedge?
I accepted the fact that nothing would grow well under it and just kept it clear and tidy.
Now if a hedge is of the dimensions you describe then the leaf surface area for transpiration is  really quite substantial, and  this is why the soil at the base is always dry. It will also be very poor in nutrients, any being there being utilised by all the fine lateral roots that you noted. These roots also have the effect of compacting  the soil.
Now all this can be overcome to a degree by forking over the soil at the base, feeding with compost/manure and a regime of watering, but the effect of this will be to encourage the hedge to send out more roots to take advantage of this. and a physical barrier  will need to be about 3 feet deep to keep the roots out of the area you intend to  utilise.
You also mention cutting the hedge hard back to the 'centreline'.
This is something I did to the hedge mentioned above, this was done with a lopper, a tool just for such a task.  The effect of this lopping was dramatic , not immediately  but after a season the hedge came back twice as vigorous  and sprouting new growth from practically ground level. So whatever you do to compromise this privet will merely invigorate it.........

You also mention that the barrier you are considering will help stop slugs. I doubt that slugs will be lurking under a privet..The soil at the base will be far too dry for them to survive there,
Also, having had such a hedge, I know that  if it does have things going in its favour, lopping, mulching, extra watering and so on,  it will put on a corresponding spurt of growth and this will of course need cutting back. With the right timing you can get away with 2 good trims a year on  a privet hedge that is more or less otherwise left alone.
One that gets the treatment above will easily put out up to 3 feet of growth in a season. Mostly horizontally. The problem now is compounded for you because you will have to cut this back and what you cut will fall where you are trying to grow crops. You must be aware of the volume of cuttings from such a sized hedge, and there are not many veg that would thrive after such an amount of clippings has fallen on them the been collected from them, no matter how carefully.
Far be it from me to  dissuade someone from growing anything, veg, flowers, shrubs fruit or whatever it might be, but nature has its own rules and these are almost always immutable and cannot be compromised even with the best of efforts and intentions.

There is one further point:
Often plants are used as foils, or even sacrificially, to attract pests that would otherwise attack the crop you are trying to grow. Well privet would have the opposite effect, any pests  would ignore the privet and go straight for your crop. When did you ever see anything bother a privet? In fact steeped or boiled privet leaves make an excellent pest repellent.
Learn to love the privet and  grow the veg somewhere else would be my advice, but you know that already don`t you? *S*

[Knoblauch]

It's only my second year doing this so I may well come to agree with you - anyhow thanks for the benefit of your hindsight.  It's really the ground elder in the hedge that might harbour slugs - if you keep hoeing around the base of the veg the birds presumably peck them off as I've been largely free of them.

[Ice]

May I remind members that this is a forum for the complete amateur to the experienced grower.  Questions should be answered without sarcasm and at a level that befits the original question.

Every member has the right to ask any question and have it answered with a degree of respect and humour, if appropriate.

[sunshineband]

Made me think though, and I've been out an done some measuring (in the rain  )too.
Our privet hedge at the end of the garden is 8ft high, and there is a raised bed 18ins from the edge of the base. It is 10 ins high and in it are planted several fruit trees and lilies etc, as well as a columnar yew (golden--looks great against the green privet)
There is a slab path between the  bed and the hedge. The foundations for the wall are about 10 ins deep.
The point is, it all works and the weeds from the base of the hedge (mainly creeping buttercup that is invasive) are no issue to control.
So.. maybe a solid barrier would do the trick, and if you do what we do when you cut the hedge (lay a sheet of fleece across it and gather it all up by the edges) then everyhting might work just fine for you.
Good luck!

[Trillium]

Half buried in the plants it sounds like a trip over and 20 stitches in the face and arms job.

Not unless you can walk through fencing, which is why it's at the property line. Without the barriers the couch roots wouldn't respect property lines.

[Knoblauch]

Funnily enough, now I've taken the hedges out the other side I find that the neighbour has done exactly this using galvanised tin, which has lasted for several decades.  Only about a foot deep but it certainly stops the ground elder - he just moved it back a few inches as we're agreeing on the boundary to put a fence along.

[sunshineband]

All's well that ends well then