Strimming and overgrowth clearance in Crediton

Crediton's high street is a long Georgian and Victorian run, and behind a good many of the frontages are the old burgage plots: narrow strips running a very long way back from the street. They are frequently forgotten about, because the bit nobody can see from the road is the bit nobody deals with.

Clearing one is straightforward cutting and awkward carrying. Access is usually through a building, a shared yard or a back lane, so the practical question before booking is where the arisings come out and where a trailer can sit while they do.

The Creedy valley carries some of the most productive farmland in Devon, and that same deep red soil is under the gardens. Ground like this does not grow a thin sward. It grows thick coarse grass, big docks and nettle beds that are heavy to cut and heavier to rake.

It also starts early. A garden here can need its first cut a fortnight before the same plot on thin coastal ground, and it keeps going later into the autumn, which makes two visits a year a much better plan than one.

The lanes around the town are full of smallholdings, farmhouses and barn conversions with more ground than a domestic garden and no farm machinery to keep it down. Paddock margins, orchard grass, long hedgebank faces and the ground around outbuildings are the standard list.

That work books by the day. Arisings from bank and paddock work are usually left to rot down where they fall, which costs nothing and is what most owners want, and the removal option is there for anything close to a house.

Crediton sits open to Atlantic weather with little between it and the west, and the valley traps damp air underneath that. The combination is why growth here is so vigorous and why a wet spell can hold a job up for days at a time.

Cutting sodden growth is slower, wraps the head and leaves a worse finish, so a date that moves for rain is a date that produces better work. You are told when it moves rather than left waiting on the morning.

The ground around Holy Cross Church and the older parts of the town has stone walls, raised boundaries and a good deal of shaded corner that never really dries. Ivy and bramble take those corners first, and clearing them is careful work rather than fast work.

Where a wall is old or dry laid the nylon head goes on and the blade stays for the open ground, which is the same rule that applies to every old boundary in the county.

On the older properties it is worth walking the boundary before booking rather than sending one photograph of the middle of the garden, because on ground like this the edges are almost always in a worse state than the open part.