Strimming and overgrowth clearance in Pinhoe

The ring of new estate housing that has gone up around Pinhoe over the last twenty years has produced a particular kind of job. The plots are small, the turf was laid on subsoil that the builders levelled rather than improved, and what comes up through it is coarse grass, docks and thistle rather than lawn.

Leave one of those for a single summer and it does not look like a neglected lawn, it looks like a field, because that is more or less what it is. Cutting it back is quick work on flat open ground, and the useful part is what it reveals: how much of it is actually grass and how much of it needs starting again.

New estates almost always come with an awkward back boundary: a strip between the fence and the site edge, a bank left over from the levelling, or a hedge line the developer planted and nobody has touched since. Those are the parts that get away first.

They cut easily because the growth is young rather than woody, and a couple of hours usually deals with a run of them. Where several neighbours share the same problem it is worth doing the whole run in one visit, which is cheaper for everybody than three separate call outs.

The original core of stone and brick cottages sits among all of this and behaves completely differently. Older gardens with mature hedges, established bramble and boundaries that have been in the same place for a century need a metal blade rather than a nylon head, and they take proportionally longer.

Anything cut here can be stacked on site to rot down, which many of the older plots have room for and which costs nothing, or taken away on the trailer.

Pinhoe sits on rising ground above the Clyst valley and is more open than the sheltered streets closer to the centre. It dries out quicker after rain, which is useful, and it is a sensible place to book when the low ground on the other side of the city is too wet to cut well.

Access is generally easy, with estate roads, drives and space to stand a trailer, and the railway station and the Cranbrook road are the usual landmarks for placing a job.

The corridor east of Pinhoe towards Cranbrook is still farmland in places and building site in others, and the properties along it have boundaries onto both. Field edges bring in thistle, dock and coarse grass; construction edges bring in whatever has seeded on disturbed ground.

Those boundaries are best cut late in the season once the seeding is over, which stops the same problem arriving again the following spring. The railway station and the golf club either side are the usual reference points for placing a job out here.