Any gardening advice?

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Having finally moved to a new house we have a pretty large garden, about 30m wide and 80 long. The first 20m or so are lawn with borders of various shrubs and a huge copper beech. All well and good :)

Beyond that is a wilderness of brambles, weeds, ferns, pine trees, hollies etc where the beehives are situated.

My question is about suggestions for:

Taming the brambles without any weedkiller.

Suggestions for wild flowers etc to give colour as much of the year as possible.

Something bee friendly.

I'll get a photo or two up tomorrow if it helps.

Thanks as always :)
 
Quoth said:
Taming the brambles without any weedkiller.
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Stout gloves (I use soft gloves underneath rubber gauntlets from Toolstation), wellies and if necessary eye protection. Cut to ground. Remove from site. Repeat (probably every month). It will get easier but you'll never win. Eventually you may be able to dig them out.

Very little will grow beneath the pine trees.
 
I'm afraid I have to agree with Jonathan about the brambles - you'll never beat them without some fairly heavy duty weed killer and even then you may well have a long running battle.

Gardens are usually fairly long term projects so I'd be tempted to see what comes up during the coming year to see what does best (which will give a clue about the soil pH etc.) before making any plans for future planting. If you have any stumps that will support climbers, thing about an ivy or 2 - the bees here go apepooh over it when it's flowering!

Good luck with the brambles.
 
Wait a year and see what comes up and make notes. You can still start to tackle the brambles though of course they are very good for wildlife.
 
sphexx said:
Wait a year and see what comes up and make notes. You can still start to tackle the brambles though of course they are very good for wildlife.
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That sounds like a perfect idea.

Certainly won't be doing much before Oct / Nov I'd imagine.

I believe that there are lots of snowdrops, daffodils etc there.
 
If you want colour through the year then plant lots of different stuff.

Foxgloves and St Johns Wort both look great, spread like weeds and attract bees. Neither lasts particularly long. Also, they spread like weeds....

Pictures would help.
 
JonathanRyan said:
If you want colour through the year then plant lots of different stuff.

Foxgloves and St Johns Wort both look great, spread like weeds and attract bees. Neither lasts particularly long. Also, they spread like weeds....

Pictures would help.
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Thanks for that. Had hoped to get a picture this evening but the rain kept me indoors. Will sort one tomorrow.
 
I'd bite the bullet as a one off.

Buy 5 litres of farm grade Roundup - about £25 from Amazon. Kill the brambles
Then start again.
 
zendog said:
I'd bite the bullet as a one off.

Buy 5 litres of farm grade Roundup - about £25 from Amazon. Kill the brambles
Then start again.
Click to expand...

That may not actually work.....it's notoriously hard to kill the mad sort of brambles with weedkiller because if you miss a single plant (and they can be dormant underground) they are going to come back.

If you do want to use Roundup then spring is your best bet. But buy it this year - there's a decent chance the EU will ban it before next spring. They keep trying to figure out how deadly it is to humans.
 
Slash and burn the brambles is my advice. Then dig and pull out as much root as possible and burn them too - very satisfying work.
I took on an allotment of about 30 x 30 yards a few years ago which had been left to become a bramble patch. It took me all day every day for two weeks to clear it but the tearing up of the roots prepared the ground perfectly.
If you then sow as much of the plot as possible with potatos next spring you'll further prepare and clear the ground for planting up flowers and shrubs in the summer.
Good luck and I bet you're going to enjoy the work once you get started.
 
What Graeme says, but if you want to use Glyphosate on the brambles I would cut them all down now and spray when they start putting up new shoots. Glyphosate interferes with growth so it has little immediate effect on established shrubby plants.
 
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Some good advice there, thanks very much.

I'm not going to use any weedkiller as I like the bees too much [emoji6]

Looks like a great project for a few years.
 
I used that stuff you paint on the leaves and it kills the specific plant when I moved into a place over run with brambles, worked a treat without affecting any other plants
 
Quoth said:
Some good advice there, thanks very much.

I'm not going to use any weedkiller as I like the bees too much [emoji6]

Looks like a great project for a few years.
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Rather than just spraying everything, it's possible to target individual plants. Time consuming but possible. Then it only takes one blackberry satiated bird to take a dump as it flies over/perches over your plot and there's a neat little package of pre-fertilised bramble seeds...
 
zendog said:
I'd bite the bullet as a one off.

Buy 5 litres of farm grade Roundup - about £25 from Amazon. Kill the brambles
Then start again.
Click to expand...
Or 5 litres of gazoline ;)
My vote goes to cutting and digging, maybe cover the area with black tarpaulin untill next summer. That will sufficate everything underneath
 
Brambles will grow through the polythene. Hell, they'll reclaim unused tarmac in a few years!
 
Quoth said:
Some good advice there, thanks very much.

I'm not going to use any weedkiller as I like the bees too much [emoji6]

Looks like a great project for a few years.
Click to expand...
I'm an ex beekeeper (though my bees are alive and well in my neighbour's roof space* :banana:) and I like wasps and ants etc etc. I don't think the glyphosate will get on the bees provided they have plenty of water and you spray in the evening. The glyphosate will have been absorbed by the leaves and any that falls on earth gets broken down. It does prrsist in water. However, if you are not happy using it then don't!

* My neighbour is OK with them and his painter/decorator wears protective gear when he is painting the upper storey :)
 
JonathanRyan said:
If you do want to use Roundup then spring is your best bet. But buy it this year - there's a decent chance the EU will ban it before next spring. They keep trying to figure out how deadly it is to humans.
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Ah yes, Glyphosate, they are trying hard to ban it, but as yet nothing is proven..
But then when has that stopped anything from being banned?

Mag1cp2x said:
Slash and burn the brambles is my advice.
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You can't beat a bit of slash and burn (y)
Very satisfying :)
 
If I've understood correctly the area of 'wilderness' is about 60m x 30m. Given it is that big, and if you want to tackle it yourself, I agree with Brian. A big petrol powered strimmer with a brushwood cutter blade (with the appropriate safety gear) is probably the best way. I also agree that apart from getting rid the brambles and other identifiable weeds, leaving it for a while to see what grows is a good idea.

After you get it cleared one plant that is useful both for wildlife and yourself is an apple tree ( in that amount of space you could have a few). They come in all sizes, they are good for insects in the spring, smaller birds check the bark for bugs, wasps and blackbirds like the fallen fruit and you get apples too.

Dave
 
My wife's back garden is a bit of a weed paradise too. I fancy a flame thrower. Not a wussy wand one, but the big guys that run on kerosene and roar..!

I'll try and talk her into it.
 
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zendog said:
I'd bite the bullet as a one off.

Buy 5 litres of farm grade Roundup - about £25 from Amazon. Kill the brambles
Then start again.
Click to expand...

id be very careful using roundup. theres plenty in the news about nasty ingredients in that stuff.
 
addicknchips said:
id be very careful using roundup. theres plenty in the news about nasty ingredients in that stuff.
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There plenty in the news about nasty things in anything you name. For years we've been told to avoid lard and welcome vegetable oils but now lard is the new wonder food and vegetable oils are bad for our brains.
Good news there because lard is tasty and most veggie oils are yucky :)
 
sphexx said:
There plenty in the news about nasty things in anything you name. For years we've been told to avoid lard and welcome vegetable oils but now lard is the new wonder food and vegetable oils are bad for our brains.
Good news there because lard is tasty and most veggie oils are yucky :)
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very true
 
As long as you don't swim in it, drink it or inhale it, you should come to no harm. Follow the instructions to the letter, especially the bits about only spraying in dead calm conditions.
 
addicknchips said:
id be very careful using roundup. theres plenty in the news about nasty ingredients in that stuff.
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I'd guarantee if there was any proof that Glyphosate in normal use was harmful, it would have been banned long ago.
 
addicnchips said:
that makes me feel much better
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Oh yes they "have our backs" no doubt about that ;)

In my course of my work, I'm fully trained and licenced) to use Cymag. And have done.
Among other first aid measures Amyl nitrite, was the cure for accidental overdoes.

It was deemed "Dangerous" and banned 31st Dec. 2004.

This was replaced with Phostoxin or (aluminium phosphide) .
there is no known antidote for aluminium phosphide intoxication.

Way to go EU (y)

 
This is what we have at the moment.

In the second one, the bees are about 2/3 of the way to the end.

I think I like the wilderness [emoji3]
 
Personally, I would change nothing. Just cut or mow paths where appropriate/necessary.
 
Quoth said:
That's what I'm coming around to.

There were bluebells when I saw the house earlier in the year and lots of daffodils around the place also.
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There you are. Treat it a a nature reserve and add things that are missing and take away things that are too plentiful.
 
Maybe there is one already but if not add a pond, even a small one.
 
Quoth said:
Taming the brambles without any weedkiller.
Click to expand...
JonathanRyan said:
Cut to ground. Remove from site. Repeat (probably every month).
Click to expand...
Don't underestimate the magnitude of this task. A couple of years ago I helped a friend tackle the brambles in her seriously overgrown back garden. The garden is probably 30m x 10m - so quite a lot smaller than yours - and the brambles were about 3m tall. It was back breaking work, totally impractical without a serious petrol strimmer. But the surprisingly awkward bit was disposal. You can't stack brambles tidily in the back of an estate car like you can with, say, logs, to take them to the council recycling centre. A skip wouldn't be much better. Eventually we decided the only practical solution was to have a big bonfire, but after we'd distributed air-blown ash over the entire neighbourhood and the fire brigade had been called out, we thought maybe that hadn't been such a bright idea after all. I don't know what I'd do about disposal if I had to do it again. Maybe look at getting a shredder / chipper?
 
Putting whippy prickly stuff Into a shredder is also hard work. Leaving to dry out and burning would probably have been my solution and I've never had to call out the fire brigade for a bonfire.
 
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