Strimming and overgrowth clearance in Newton Abbot

The town sits on the flat floodplain where the Teign becomes tidal, with the Bovey basin clay workings to the north west, and heavy clay is under a great deal of it. Clay holds water at the surface, which produces rushes, coarse tussock grass and thick docks rather than an even sward.

Tussock grass is the tell. It shrugs off a nylon head and has to be taken with a blade, and it is one of the few domestic jobs where a garden that looks like ordinary long grass turns out to need the heavy machine.

There are Victorian railway era terraces here in large numbers, and their gardens are the familiar long narrow strips with a rear lane serving some rows and nothing serving others. Where a lane exists the job is quick; where it does not, the arisings come out through the house.

Because the terraces run in long uniform rows, several neighbouring plots in the same state is common. Doing three in a morning is much cheaper for everybody than three separate visits, and it is worth a word along the row before booking.

The town has a lot of commercial and light industrial ground, and the recurring job there is not landscaping but control: yard edges, fence lines, the strip behind a unit, and the growth that has closed in on a gate or a sightline. That work is quick, obvious and priced the same way as anything else.

It also tends to be easy to work from. Yards have space to park, gates to open and hard standing to load off, so almost all of the booked time goes into cutting.

Low lying ground and mist off the estuary keep the town damp, and shaded corners hold moisture right through the year. Growth carries on later into the autumn here than on the higher ground inland.

That makes a September or October clearance well worth having rather than an afterthought, because ground left through the winter in this state starts the spring already behind.

The ground out towards the racecourse and Stover Country Park is flatter, wetter and more open, with long boundaries onto grazing and parkland. Rushes and coarse grass dominate, and a wet winter leaves standing water that is still there in May.

Timing matters more than technique on ground like that. Cutting it in a dry spell in late summer gets twice as much done in the same hours as cutting it in a wet June.

Where ground floods or sits wet through the winter, the arisings are better taken away than stacked, because a heap left on wet clay simply does not rot down and is still there, sodden, the following spring.