New beech plants - worth 'tying' to a fence for stability?

I've recently planted quite a number of beech hedging plants (currently about 6 feet tall, the main 'trunk' being about an inch or so in diameter). They are as good as against a wooden fence line that's about three and a half feet tall with two horizontal bars.

Naturally the wind is blowing them about a lot (I'm in quite an exposed coastal-ish area and winds can get very strong and even gale force at times) and I want to make sure they grow straight, particularly given their size - with that in mind would it be adding a strap to each trunk and screwing it to the fence?

Would this make them susceptible to snapping though or weaken the trunk once the straps are eventually removed?

 

Bumping this because I'm now sorely tempted to put a decent rubber tree strap around each of them about 3 or 4 feet up the trunk and screw that to the wooden fence, if I don't I think the whips be growing horizontally by Christmas .....

 

If you do use a tie and screw it to the fence then ideally it should be no more than 1/3 way up - so 2ft for yours.
This keeps the roots stable.
If the whip is blowing in the wind a lot of the time, this will break the hair-like feeder roots and they'll keep needing to grow more.
With the root ball stable that won't happen so they will settle in much faster.
But it will allow the upper part to blow in the wind which will strengthen the main trunk.
Make sure the ties don't rub on the trunk or that'll cause more problems

It's something you only really need to do though if there is a problem, and maybe because of your location it is needed.

 

Thanks very much, that's very useful advice.

You mention about ensuring that the ties don't rub on the trunk, I already have some straps very similar to this type:

45cm + 60cm Rubber Tree Ties Buckle Strap Plant Support Whip Bare Root Straps | eBay

(using this as an example after a quick search for a photo, I don't have those exact ones)

so I guess they should be snug enough to grip the trunk but not too tight because then they would restrict growth? Then again, being rubber they should stretch as the beech grows.

I would wrap each around a trunk, tighten up with the rubber hoop and then screw the loose 'tongue' to the fence. As the 'tongue' will only be on one side the whips will still be able to move very slightly where fixed but I can't think of a better way to fix them to the horizontal wooden bar (and the tongue isn't long enough to fully wrap around said bar).

 

They look fine.
You will need to adjust the tie as the trunk expands as they don't stretch to any extent so you may need to re-think about how best to attach them to the fence.
But it's just a matter of unbuckling it and loosening the bit that goes around the trunk to give a bit more space.
Once established your trees won't need any help and they can be removed.

When I was a lad we had 300ft of beech hedging on one side of the garden, when it got to about 8ft it was thick, sturdy and impenetrable.

 

Thank you, I now wish I had a 300ft beech hedge. :-)

Out of interest, roughly how much will the trunks of young whips grow in diameter every year? They are currently about 1 inch in diameter.

 

They don't grow quickly. Eventually, they'll have trunks several inches in diameter[as a hedging plant] depending on conditions, and how you clip it, but they'll take many years to get to that stage. My Dad's hedge was planted when I was a baby [quite a long time ago!] and it was a very densely planted, staggered hedge of around 150 feet. When I had to cut it for him, once it became too much for him, it took a fair bit of effort. The trunks were the thickness of my arms and legs, and they'd been that sort of size for decades.

This is always the problem with buying large specimens to plant though. Ones half the size would have been easier to manage especially when planting at this time of year. They would have needed no support, so there would have been no extra expense.

 

I don't know.
I was 2yrs old when we moved there soon after the hedge was put in.
But even in my 20's I can recall that the trunks were only probably 2" or so.
The hedge was 4 trees deep.
My main recollection was dad cutting it in the summer - clouds of whitefly everywhere. It wasn't a nice job.

 

Thanks, at least I won't need to adjust the straps a few times a year.

As for the height of the whips, that wasn't intentional. I had previously ordered a number of 90/120 cm whips and that's what I received so I ordered some more, yet despite being labeled as 90/120 cm they were about double that. I didn't send them back as I initially appreciated having taller whips but now I'm starting to regret it. Since then I've also ordered some more 90/120 and they were as described. All from the same place too.

Ah well, live and learn.

Still thinking of ordering more 90/120 cm and would then stagger them with the 6 foot whips.

On another matter, just been reading about Beech Woolly Aphid so that's something else to look out for. Seemingly it's only a problem with younger plants (which mine are of course).

 

We have x1 beech in amongst the border, about 20cm across and has been here since we arrived 2012. It's been cut to keep it at 2m since and has never objected. Beech makes wonderful wood for the stuffa!

 

If I'd got whips that size, especially if it wasn't autumn through to early spring [ie bare root season] I'd have cut them back to around 3 feet/90cm. That makes it all much easier, especially for getting them established, and encouraging them to grow out more than up, and therefore bushier.

 

Yes @fairygirl is right, the only thing you regret with hedging later on is not pruning it initially to help bush out. We were too conservative with pruning a small euonymus hedge and it took a bit longer to bush out because we didn't want to sacrifice some height initially...thankfully it was just litre pot sized plants from B&Q so after four years it's a lovely sturdy little hedge as we wanted. Glad to have got rid of all box and not to have another plant that I have to check weekly

And don't worry about wooly aphids, don't do any real damage to our copper beech just look unsightly for a bit, used to remove it but after five years our plants cope very well.

 

Regarding pruning - so should I be pruning these 6 foot tall whips now?

How about the 3 foot tall whips that I also have?

If yes to any of the above then what exactly do I prune - do I just remove the main growing tip? And if so, I how do I take out?