An Upright Hicks Yew Hedge - Starting Small

About a week ago, I posted a photo showing the new little collection of Hicks Upright Yews that I picked up at Home Depot for a song with the intention of planting a hedge in the back.  Welp...I started that project this week.

If you've been following along, I'm using this Bunny Williams sweeping yew hedge as inspiration and after I get these established, I'm going to try to prune them into curving, swooping shapes.

I started to place them out and realized that the spacing wasn't going to work.  What you see here above and below is 3' (36") spacing between the centers of the pots.  Looks too far apart to me.

So, off I went to pick up 3 more shrubs and shrunk the gap down to 30".  

And after I dug the holes (remembering Ralph Snodsmith's advice about digging the holes!!!), I stuck them in the ground and threw some mulch that I had on hand on top of them. 

Here's the immediate aftermath of planting them.  I have to clean up the front of the bed, get more mulch and clean up the back of the bed, too.  

The tree trunk that you see in the photo right above is the LOST Weeping Cherry that I haven't yanked out just yet.  Where this starts to get interesting is when we talk about the walking path that I've been dreaming up for more than a year.

The path will fall to the right of these yews in the photo above and will wind across the backyard.  I'm thinking that this "section" of the path is now the clearest to achieve - it is just a matter of coming up with the design and then acquiring the materials.