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The GARDEN hedge you filthy brutes!!
It's pretty tall - about 3m, and has a flat top that needs trimming as well as the sides. I'm thinking that what I need is some sort of chainsaw-on-a-stick electric contraption such as advertised recently on the telly box, but I really don't know. I have a couple of green Bosch electric tools (drill, sander) so I'm not heavily invested in a battery ecosystem. What would be best to get now, both for the immediate trimming job, and to maybe be the basis of further purchases such as a mower?
Thanks !!
My advice, having watched them do my neighbours 3m high hedge, is to phone somebody up who does that kind of thing for a living and get them to do it
They turned up with some serious looking kit, took about 3-4ft off the top, tidied all the rest up, then took all the cuttings away in what seemed to be about an hour
The top will be difficult as a 3m hedge is quite wide and using a multi tool will not get to half way. Good for cutting the sides though. You probably will get more use out of hedge cutting attachment than chain saw as that's more for pruning
Chop it to 2mtr and then it will be easy to maintain with either shears or a bog standard powered trimmer.
I bought one of the long pole trimmers. Was quite hard work and difficult to do the top of the hedge with it. My bush was burly enough to prop my ladder against so finished the top like that.
I usually hate all that kind of stuff but thoroughly enjoyed going around the garden trimming the crap out of everything.
Mine was a Ryobi rechargeable but imagine they're all much of a muchness.
My advice, having watched them do my neighbours 3m high hedge, is to phone somebody up who does that kind of thing for a living and get them to do it
They turned up with some serious looking kit, took about 3-4ft off the top, tidied all the rest up, then took all the cuttings away in what seemed to be about an hour
Exactly what I did. When you see how thick the trunks were, it shows just how difficult it would be, they were about 3-4” across. There were four blokes, IIRC, with a large truck with mesh sides, towing a large industrial chipper. It took them most of the day! The hedge, which is spruce, was about 3m high, on both sides of the garden about 6-7m one side, and 3-4m the other. Now I only have to use loppers to trim taller stems growing out of the top, and let them drop down into the hedge, and trim the sides.
It cost me about £600, but I’d have spent that in time and equipment, then there’s getting rid of what was effectively a hedge on its own.
What binners said
Just moved into a new place, 12m of leylandii hedge in the back garden. 1st stage is a trim so we can get conservatory roof replaced, second stage is full removal. ****ing horrible things.
Get a pro in to do it, the extra it will cost is absolutely worth it for the removal of stress.
Think about whether a battery powered hedge cutter is both powerful enough and runs for long enough. I can be out for a couple of hours trimming hedge at a time using a corded electric hedge cutter. It would annoy the crap out of me having to continually stop to recharge the battery or fork out for multiple batteries.
As someone with over 250m of privet hedges, minimum height 2.5m, I'd get a man in. I have someone come round at the end of the season to do mine, but look after them myself through the summer ( growing season) and usually start in June. It's basically like painting the Forth Rd bridge and frankly it will be the death of me! I've a cordless extending Bosch thing that's actually quite good, but not as balanced as my old petrol thing.
I repeat, get a man in.
What binners said
Always sound advice :-). It's what we've done so far, but I'm wondering if we can manage to keep it trimmed ourselves and save some money.
save some money.
Buying/hiring the right tools , the faff/time of doing the job plus clearing up and disposing of the waste .
Get a person in.
If you can get to Leeds you're welcome to borrow a Stihl long reach hedge trimmer with additional extension bar and about half a dozen batteries.
Will totally **** up your back using it though.
Pole trimmers are heavy and awkward - I have the Ryobi one and it works very well but is quite a workout. Miles easier than using a step-ladder, for a hedge which is just out of reach for normal tools. I wouldn't touch a 3m hedge though, that needs reducing which is a whole new ballgame of work.
Note that if birds are nesting in it then it's basically illegal, not that anyone gives a shit.
I do my FiL's once a year at the end of the season - conveniently, his birthday is September so it's my present to him.
Slight hijack, but is the advice about only trimming conifer hedges march and September about hedge health/growth or just about checking for nesting birds?
Also, can you cut hedges back smaller or does exposing the brown wood inside harm them and therefore you can only trim them?
stop analysing Strava
@theotherjonv - I was going to post something similar, but wondered if anyone would get the obscure HMHB reference 😂
Ground control to Monty Don
there's an obscure HMHB reference for everything. And thankfully, there's also someone to get every reference.
I wonder who this references though:
He got a Boardman bike on the 'Cycle to Work' scheme.
Discovered he really enjoyed it.
Started watching the Tour de France highlights on ITV4; worshipped at the altar of Wiggo and Froome-dog.
Goes out every Sunday in full Sky replica kit
(the disdain in the voice on the last line is magnificent)
I have a Makita DUX60 with strimmer, hedge and pole saw and extension pole. If you already have the Makita LXT system its epic.
Have pruned many a hedge and bush over 3m high and the combo of mini chain saw and hedge trimmer is unbeatable. A full set up will be knocking on £1000 but compared with £200 for a half assed effort from a Leeds “gardener” its good value over a year or two.
My neighbour has left his Leylandii hedge get too tall - about 25m x 4m tall. I have a Ryobi mains pole trimmer - a cordless one probably doesn’t have the grunt to cut through anything bigger than 12mm. It’s still an absolute pain even though I don’t have to do the top. Dealing with all the trimmings is a pain too as I have to take them to the dump - too woody for the compost heap.
<p style="text-align: left;">I have a Makita DUX60 with strimmer, hedge and pole saw and extension pole. If you already have the Makita LXT system its epic.</p>
I've the strimmer and the hedge cutter options on mine and while the strimmers awesome the hedgecutters pants compared to my Stihl 2stroke.
I use the Makita for the privet on the neighbours boundary but the wild rose, hornbeam hazel and holly on the road side just laughs at it and gets stuck in it + stops it dead. The Stihl just cuts right through like butter.
Slight hijack, but is the advice about only trimming conifer hedges march and September about hedge health/growth or just about checking for nesting birds?
Nesting birds. It's advice to farmers, gardeners can normally poke through a small hedge to check and trim at any time
Also, can you cut hedges back smaller or does exposing the brown wood inside harm them and therefore you can only trim them?
Depends what forms the hedge. Some conifers won't recover easily from a close haircut, some shrubs like box honeysuckle can be cut back massively
Nesting birds. It’s advice to farmers, gardeners can normally poke through a small hedge to check and trim at any time
Easy- I got dogs abuse on here for suggesting that one time from a prominent bird lover on here.
Slight hijack, but is the advice about only trimming conifer hedges march and September about hedge health/growth or just about checking for nesting birds?
I do it that way because of nesting birds and I find as late a trim as possible doesn't see regrowth through winter, so my spring trim is more a cut back. This means my unruly hedge is now more respectable and about half the size it was when we bought the place... It's still 1.8m high and a metre thick...
I have a long reach corded hedge trimmer for my leylandi (actually my neighbour's) and it works a treat. Yes it's a bit of a faff to cut but the trimmer was less than £100 and it only needs doing twice a year without too much to cut if you keep on top of it. If you've got the money then pay someone but there's a lot of money to be saved in the long run by doing it yourself.
Easy- I got dogs abuse on here for suggesting that one time from a prominent bird lover on here.
The problem with fixed dates is that birds don't have calendars, ideally you'd always check because we don't understand the effects of changing seasons/weather on our wildlife yet.
Advice on a countryside hedge is not to do any work that would harm birds or their nests 1st March to 31st August (not April as quoted ^^)
I have a long reach corded hedge trimmer for my leylandi (actually my neighbour’s) and it works a treat.
Another reason why I want ours out. Don't like the burden it places on our neighbour to trim.
Nice fence with a manageable privet will do nicely
Don't forget that the waste, i.e. trimmings will take more volume that when being a hedge, i.e. you'll need a shredder machine and big enough to cope with stem size, worth clarifying if/when you get someone in what they will do with waste too. If getting someone in try to get local recommendations and you should see their work, it can look untidy for a while if it all goes wrong.
Good luck.
BTW: HMHB reference up there was excellent, did not know about bike /hipster references 😉
We have lots of hedges so i have petrol, elec, pole and chainsaw. Re. the birds thing... even if you check you can still find you have accidentally destroyed a nest when doing some serious trimming, so on that basis I do mine over the autumn and winter only.
But to answer the original question, if its a big hedge then get a pro to get it down to a manageable size then do it yourself from that point on.
Makita - battery powered pole hedge trimmer. It's extendable and has the tilt function at the head so can be set at either +/- 90 degrees to the pole. It extends quite a good way maybe to about 3 meters and is really useful.
Getting someone in 4 times a year to do my hedges would soon rack up so this thing at about £100 will pay for itself many times over.
I hate cutting hedges but this is about as good as it gets for a self done job. Well, it's not so much the cutting of the hedge its the clearing up afterwards that's a pain in the arse.
Depending on the type of hedge it is, at 3m some of the branches may well be too thick to cut with a hedge trimmer. We have lots of laurel in our garden and anything past a couple of years' growth is too thick for a trimmer so we have a long-reach chainsaw + a work platform to get to the top (but ours is only about 2.5m I reckon – I think I'd be pushed to manage it if it was much higher)
Trimmed bush? I get a professional to do ours. It’s not huge, but it’s very shapely.
Is your hedge flipping the bird?
Timely thread.
Like the OP, I have a green Bosch battery drill. I impulse-bought it recently (possibly on the back of a PSA here?) because a) I've wanted a cordless drill for years and b) it was something stupid like £200 reduced to £40. There's an insert in the case advertising their 'system' of like two dozen compatible other tools.
Our back yard doesn't have a hedge, but it does have a (currently nest-filled) ivy infestation and some sort of bush that grows like all buggery as soon as we get sun and rain in rapid succession. When we first moved here I "got a man in" because it was like a rainforest and honestly I'd do it again if I could remember who the hell it was. The year after I had at it myself with the mains hedge trimmer I had from the old house, and burnt it out.
I was eyeing up compatible Bosch offerings (and there's multiple, some of which are rather expensive), but really I'm deeply sceptical as to how good a job they might do.
Is your hedge flipping the bird?
I'm trying to work out whether it's supposed to be a Monster Munch or a Space Raider. Or a dead imposter from Among Us.
I do a bit of this kind of thing for a living…
Get someone in. But not me; I hate hedges 😂
The EGO battery stuff is supposedly good. I had one of their blowers for a while and liked it.
If it’s a conifer hedge they’re awful, dusty, itchy, you’ll notice every imperfection if you don’t get the sides perfectly flat.
However, if it’s that wide, it’ll also be pretty load bearing. I often do the top just by walking/sitting on it with the hedge trimmer.
Tripod/Hedge ladders are your friend. Resting a ladder against it doesn’t work well and over reaching from a stepladder with power tools isn’t ideal.
I’ve got a set you can borrow if you can get them from Harrogate.
How are you with ivy and travelling to East Lancashire?
It's nesting season anyroad so...
I'm another voter for the 'get a man in'.
We've a very mature, huge privet. About 10m long but ends up 3+m high (=5-6m from the roadside path as the garden is elevated vs the road). And probably 3-4feet thick (to mix units). Grows like a barsteward. Then a load of ivy that just. won't. die.
Stacked with birds during the spring and summer, and bees when its flowering (which its been doing the past couple of weeks). If we miss getting it cut early enough (like we did again this last end of winter) then it's a monster job come Sept.
I was eyeing up compatible Bosch offerings (and there’s multiple, some of which are rather expensive), but really I’m deeply sceptical as to how good a job they might do.
I have the Bosch cordless hedge trimmer – it's fine for cutting ivy back and only starts to struggle a bit with thicker laurel branches (but so did my old corded trimmer). Two batteries is helpful if you have lots of hedge to cut.