How to minimise work in the garden......

.....and maybe make my garden work for me!

We have a huge lawn which takes ages to cut even with a ride-on mower. How hard is it to grow Christmas Trees? How long to grow and how much do they sell for?

Any other ideas to reduce the amount of lawn which needs mowing?

 

The money is in the no needle drop varietys, priceing is usually done by tree height, no idea on current prices. In the past I did quite a bit of plantation maintance when I was involved in forestry.

If you have rabbits then you will need to rabbit fence the area.

Plantaions are farr from maintance free, You need to strim regularly or spray between the rows especially in the initial years.

Some pruning is needed, you want to remove multiple leaders and check any over vigour, the sides are also trimmed up to give shape were needed using a long bladed very sharp machete type knife.

Lastly, they need cutting and packing in one short 2 week window, no small undertaking.

In short, I doubt it would be viable.

 

As for other sudgestions, either have longer grass areas that you cut bianually or plant up a min orchard or perhaps a combination of all three possibly look into keeping some poultry.

 

hi
i have no personal experience of xmas trees but i once worked for a firm who had trees as a sideline,also a trout farm, anyway , they were always planning 8/10 yrs ahead ,buying the trees etc ,think about it , when you buy a sapling it needs time to settle before it starts growing ,then to get to 3/4 ft say a foot a year:confused:

 

Thanks for the replies. I suspect the long grass area is the one most likely to win!

 

Linlin, instead of christmas trees, why not set up an orchard?:thumb:

 

Hi David

Expense and work - fruit trees would be more expensive and difficult to grow. Because they're more expensive, I'd need to lug water up the garden to make sure they survived whereas a .69p christmas tree could be left to the elements.

 

my parents have a wildlife area with wildflowers etc etc and a pond and they pretty much leave it alone and enjoy the hedgehogs, foxes, bees, butterflies, etc etc etc. its fab.

 

how about getting a gardener to cut it

 

I'm sure if you allowed the grass to grow and plant wild plants there it would look quite stunning and you could always cut a track though it so you could walk through the area without disturbing the wildlife that is show to come to live there.Hel.xxx.

 

Lol Shiney I thought it was just a case of throwing a mixture out into the wild to get things started, but then again things are never that easy are they!:( Hel.xxx.

 

I've started a small wildflower area, planting plugs, only to realise for them to selfseed, I need to dig up the grass around them! I also can't see a way of trimming the long grass after flowering unless I do it by hand and rake it afterwards.

 

In general planting plugs rarely works, to start a true wildflower meadow you need to plough up and seed drill with wildflower mix but this is a extremly expensive.

If you simply leave theexising grass to grow long you will get butter cups, ozeye daisys and dandelions and will have and atractive ish area of long grass some folk are content with this alone.

As for cutting, a good qulity brush cutter with steel blade is what i use or for very large areas a hired sykle bar mower (allen sythe). I cut around August cut, let it lie for two days to dry then rake up and trailer off to a corner then either left to compost or burnt depending on the customer.

If acess allows I use my pick up and ifor williams sided trailer to shift the cut grass, it doesnt actually take that long, I simply throw it into the trailer with a pitch fork.