Overgrown garden and novice gardener!
GreenNovice2
Posts: 10
i am very much a novice gardener and am wanting to get started on clearing my overgrown garden, just where to start curbs my enthusiasm! It is a large garden, once part of a Victorian orchard and someone in the past has planted and looked after it, with many lovely shrubs and other plants and an old Apple tree from the orchard is still there. It has become really overgrown, with brambles and other weeds and a lot of the shrubs and bushes are going a bit wild! I really want to keep the lovely mature shrubs and many other plants I find under the overgrown stuff, but am not sure where to start. I have read a lot about using brush cutters and weed killers, which I have no problem with though am also concerned re the latter about damaging the plants I want to save and of course the wildlife and my dogs and cat! In addition, the soil is really rich, so I don't want to damage that either. Any tips and suggestions would be really welcome from more experienced gardeners out there.
Another quick part of my query - I have a large thriving New Zealand Flax and wonder if it could be moved without damaging it?
thanks????????
Posts
Hi GreenNovice, sounds really exciting
Until you are sure what you have I would be inclined to attack brambles etc with loppers or secateurs. It means if you cut something back and then change your mind you can let it grow again and there are no problems with drift or weedkiller getting on the wrong plants. It will also give you an idea of the space you have between the mature shrubs with an instant result
My family say I have to be supervised with the loppers as I get a bit too enthusiastic 
, but its great fun
Hey GreenNovice,
The easiest thing to do with an overgrown area is break it down into blocks and do one block at a time, otherwise you just spend a lot of time toing and froing and not much else.
It can be overwhelming when faced with so much at once. It may be a good idea to tackle the garden in sections. Get one bit done and move to the next. Chicky, who's not here at the moment, found that soaking the end of pipecleaners in weed killer and inserting them into the hollow stems of brambles worked a treat
.
Good luck with the garden and let us see some pictures as you develop it
I would echo what the others have said about doing a bit at a time. Start near the house, or the bit you see first from the windows and get that tidied up a bit, then move further out. Psychologically more satisfying than spreading yourself too thinly! Best not to use weedkillers - as well as the plants you can see, there could be spring bulbs hiding in those beds to give you a surprise show next year when the shrubs are cleared back!
If you have lots of shrubs to cut back and plan to keep and maintain them it might be worth investing in a shredder. The volume of branches once you start hacking can take up a lot of space (forget green wheelie bin!) and mean lots of trips to get rid of them. Most people can't have bonfires and even if you can ( I live way out in the country) the weather often has other ideas! The chips can go on your compost heap to maintain that rich soil, or even be used for paths in less formal parts of the garden.
All of the above and, if you can find afford it, get a knowledgeable person in to help you at first. That's if you can find such a person - they're few and far between and the good ones are always very busy.
Let us know how you get on
Hi GreenNovice. Good advice from the others re taking it a piece at a time, although I know how frustrating it can be when you want to get it all done now! Another idea in a big space is to go round and take photos at one month intervals so that you can see what's there, when it flowers or fruits and so on. It also means that when you're tackling the messy bits, you can see what you've achieved when you feel a bit disillusioned.
The flax can be moved but you might find it quite hard going to get it all out in one piece - it will depend on your soil and what else is around it etc. The good thing about that is, it will benefit from being split!
I live in west central Scotland - not where that photo is...
When I moved in to my house my 50 + foot garden had not had anything done to it in around 20 years. It was bramble, ivy and bindweed forest.
We cut it all back to the ground and started digging and carried on digging for about a year. We didn't use any weed killers but looking back the brambles were the worst, if I had a huge amount of brambles I'd have got someone in to spray them.
We had the same. Why not organise a working bee? Get pals to help with a BBQ as a thank you at the end of the day. It worked for us. Brambles/raspberries will pull and you get the root that way, then you can spray. Be ready tho, docks come back for years!
put up some pics on the garden pics tread, would be fab to watch your work in progress
A A Milne
Sounds like a great project Green Novice - very exciting. It would be helpful to have one or two pictures so we can see the scale of your problem (one man's 'large garden' is another man's 'huge estate') and perhaps give you some advice re the best tools for the job (e.g. whether you need a brush cutter or whether a tough lawn mower will do).
Other than that the advice to do a bit at a time is very sound.
Thanks everyone for your advice and suggestions, especially a good idea to think about tackling one area at a time and I did start with clearing some brambles today that are climbing skywards through and round the apple tree! Huge things with stems of around 4cm! I just used a large pair of pruners and gloves, but was thinking of painting the remaining stalks with weed killer at the root or trying my weed wand. That might be quite satisfying after today's fight ???? Thanks again for all the comments. Will try to get a picture on.