Hedges are hard work!

 My cough is more or less gone, the cough medicine was very good and I've had a couple of good night's sleep.(With the usual loo breaks!) But I'm feeling a lot better.. so I decided to help Dh to tidy up the front approach and drive way to our bungalow yesterday afternoon. We're plagued by Mountain Ash and Sycamore seeds from another property and they grow everywhere.

We have the hedges cut twice a year regularly and over the three years since we've been here, the cost has increased enormously, so last year we paid £1,500; hence we had the back 30m of 6ft privet hedge, which was very scrappy looking removed and a fence instead. It looks very nice and very tidy, especially, as I bought a whole lot of small garden trees and flowering shrubs to plant in front of the fence.

Photo is the new fence before we planted the small trees and shrubs.

This year I had booked a hedge firm that we used last Autumn, as he was fairly reasonable and he made a good job of the remaining side hedge, which is a 6ft Copper Beech at the top of our back garden and the one bordering our front garden just 4ft, a small leaf privet hedge. He was to come in February/March I did text him to 'touch base' just to remind him.. and he replied with 'he was waiting for a dry spell.'

Have you guessed what happened next? Yep, he didn't get back to me. Then in April I had a text to say that he had injured his shoulder and was giving up his hedge trimming business and would give our name to some one else! I just sorted some one myself, who was recommended on FB.. He came 2 weeks ago, and the work looked ok, so we were fairly happy. We said we'd see him in September. In case you haven't realised getting a hedge cutting firm has its problems!

But he didn't dig out the Mountain Ash small trees nor a couple of Sycamores which had sprung up in the hedging. So that's what Dh and I tackled, I also trimmed back some shoots on the Japonica, as it borders the drive and is quite prickly. We more or less tidied up all the bits he had missed.

 We also pulled out the ivy, as it grows faster than anything I've ever known.  We had some daisies in the paving spaces on the pathway to clear too, on the approach to the front door.

So all dug up, swept clean and we're looking good, and it does look very good too, as we had the bungalow front wall painted white last month, so we're very trim and tidy. We were very pleased with our work, especially as our neighbour, who has a building firm, cleared all the weeds from the road gutters last Monday evening, he and another man swept the road clean!!! You might wonder why? But he is one of the three houses by us, who have been having building work of one sort or another done since we moved here, 3 years in June. There's been a lot of muddy skip lorries, builders merchants delivering stuff and work men here the whole time and the road showed it too.

Being OAPs, we always finish what ever work we're doing at 3:00pm but we worked on to get it all finished. We were a good 3 hours in all. So when we came in for a cuppa, which was well deserved, Dh said..'what if we had the 4ft hedge on the side of the front garden removed and a picket fence put up instead???'

'Its an idea,' I replied!

Chrisxx