Advice needed: Clearing an overgrown garden

Wow what a challenge but at least you have what most gardeners would give their eye teeth when starting off, framing green foliage boundary hedging.

The first question to ask if what you want from your garden. If you want very large patio and pathed area you may go about it all a little differently than if you want a first class garden with shrubs and flower beds and a lawn.

First of all save all the good plants you want, you could even pot some of the smaller ones up.

Most people try to find out about garden flowers and shrubs before they start gardening, my advice is to find out about weeds first, it save a lot of heartache later. Every time you see a weed say to yourself, â??one years seeding, seven years weedingâ?, it does help believe me! Try and find out how the different weeds in your garden spread, tap rooted ones in particular, Docks, Dandelions etc..

Here is a web site for you

http://www.garden.org/weedlibrary/index.php?q=show&id=2380

You first then need to eradicate the perrenilal â??bruisersâ??, the ones that have tap roots or rhizomes, I think I spotted a â??Dockâ?? in there. There are many ways to eradicate weeds. You can smother them with carpet or black polythene. You can burn them off with a flame gun or you can use weedkiller. You could of course also trade the Labrador in for a pig!
If you use weedkiller choose a systemic weed killer containing glyphosate. (cheapest at Wilkinsonâ??s) and spray them off first.

Close all the windows, kids and dogs out of the way, gloves and mask on and spray, itâ??s a contact herbicide so when you have finished its safe to use the garden. Chemicals are however expensive, thatâ??s why I would just concentrate on the bruisers first.

Here is another site to help especially if you are organic
http://www.the-organic-gardener.com/weed.html

And another

http://gardening.wsu.edu/library/weed001/weed001.htm

Someone suggested itâ??s a long job I would not completely agree, itâ??s a one day job for a contractor (who will happily plough every perennial weed back in and within a month you will have three times more with twice the vigour!

But as I said first of all, you need to decide what you want from your plot before you begin.

 

I've just seen a brilliant way of clearing your garden on the TV. It was at a RHS garden (can't remember which one) and they said it cleared it down to a really good level and it wasn't hard work at all. The brambles were cleared as well.

You wanna know what it was and this is no joke its just been on UKTV gardening channel. They used pigs. I think u should go and find a farmer with some pigs and see if u could borrow some to clear your garden. It was excellent. I would deffo do it if my garden needed it

 

I was gonne suggest getting a small herd of goats in... :D
Pigs are OK... just make sure they don't eat you though!

 

Big problem with pigs is they dont understand that your neighbours may not want there gardens clearing too!