Strimming and overgrowth clearance in Cullompton

Cullompton sits on the flat of the Culm valley, and the ground holds damp and frost in a way the higher land either side does not. What grows on it is lush, heavy and slow to dry, and a plot here cut in a wet week takes noticeably longer than the same plot in July.

That is worth building into the plan rather than fighting. Booking a clearance on the back of a dry spell gets more done in the same hours, and where a date has to move for rain, it moves.

There is a great deal of late twentieth century estate housing here and a continuing run of new building on the edges. The plots are modest and mostly flat, and the recurring job is not the garden itself but the rear boundary: the hedge line, the strip against a field, or the bank left when the site was levelled.

Those runs are quick to cut and worth doing as a run rather than one house at a time. Where several neighbours have the same problem, one visit covering the lot costs everybody less than three separate minimum charges.

The country immediately around the town is full of small paddocks and pony fields, and the margins are the first thing to go. Ragwort is a real consideration in horse country, and where it is present it is pointed out rather than shredded through the rest of the arisings.

Field edges, gateways, the ground around field shelters and troughs and the long hedgebank faces are the usual list, and it is day work rather than hour work. Stock has to be off the ground being cut before anything starts.

Access here is generally easy. The M5 junction is on the doorstep, the estate roads are wide and most rural properties have a yard or a gateway a trailer can use, so very little time is lost to logistics.

The medieval and Georgian core along Fore Street is the exception, with narrow frontages, cob and thatch behind and limited parking, and it wants the same careful treatment as any old building: nylon head near walls, nothing thrown at glass.

Behind Fore Street there is a surprising amount of back land: old yards, service access, small plots between buildings and strips that belong to nobody in particular. They grow unchecked because no one is quite sure they are theirs.

Those are quick, useful jobs, usually inside the two hour minimum, and they matter more than their size suggests because they are what the back of a business or a flat looks out onto.

Where a business owns the yard behind it, one clearance and one cut later in the summer is usually the whole of what is needed for the year, and the second visit is quicker and cheaper than the first.