I offer a professional and reliable grass cutting service in Bedford and surrounding villages. 

Using a Hayter machine with a split roller. This protects your lawn when turning at the edges. A regular mowing of your grass keeps your garden looking its best.

Never scalp your lawns and cut the grass to short.

Free stripes of course.

All lawns are trimmed around difficult areas, edged every time and blown tidy around the edge before mowing takes place.

The two main seasons in the year to scarify are spring and autumn.  

Scarifying is a process that removes large quantities of dead organic matter in the form of grass clippings and dead moss and even the healthiest of lawn benefit from being scarified. This organic matter will very quickly form a dense layer on the surface of the soil, and is known as thatch. The most effective way to dethatch a lawn is with a scarifier.  

Once the lawn has been scarified it is advisable to over seed the lawn.

Aeration is the process of inserting small holes in the ground with the aim of providing air circulation along with better water and nutrient consumptions for the roots of the grass. 

The reason it is necessary to aerate your lawn is that some soil is naturally very compact. 

Lawns with hard or clay soil should be aerated once a year

Once your lawn aeration is complete you should have fertilizer and top dressing applied to give your grass the extra ingredients it needs to thrive

The principal ingredients of good lawn fertilisers are a combination of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P) and potassium (K). But what do they actually do?

Nitrogen helps to promote sturdy plants, giving strong shoots and leaves and dense growth which helps to reduce competition from weeds

Phosphorus helps the grass to establish and grow strong root systems.

Potassium reduces the impact of stress on the plant by giving it resistance to drought, disease, wear and tear and cold weather.

The trouble with hedges, much like me, is that they suffer from middle-age spread. What begins well enough as a boundary four feet high and 15 inches wide grows a fraction higher and wider each season, since you clip only the soft, young growth, leaving the older, twiggier bits building up behind them.

Before long the hedge is too big to cut without standing on steps; it’s creating shade as well as occupying valuable garden space, and you need to do something drastic. 

The best time of all to cut a mature hedge back hard is the start of the growing season, around late March or mid April. But that’s a busy time in the garden so most professional gardeners do any major hedge cut-backs during the winter, when there’s a natural gap in their work schedule. 

Not all hedging plants can withstand a major cut-back. I never attempt it with conifers, not even leylandii, as they’ll look awful when the inner stems are exposed.  The prime candidates to trim in the spring are formal hedges of yew, privet, Lonicera nitida, beech and hornbeam. If you have overgrown holly, cotoneaster, pyracantha or escallonia hedges I would treat them to a hard cut-back in spring

Owning and maintaining a beautiful garden takes a great deal of time and effort. If you don’t have the time to devote to this, let me do it for you. 

Planting bulbs and summer bedding

Cleaning out the weeds, leaves and twigs.

Removing dead flowers and branches to boost plant health.

Trimming to encourage plant health and flowering.

Mulching to prevent stress from weather and discourage weed growth.

Winter cleanups and splitting overgrown perennials and grasses

Give vegetables the sunniest spot you have. Sunshine makes for stocky, disease-resistant plants and sweeter flavoured onions, carrots, tomatoes and chillies. If you need shade, for salads or strawberries, it’s easy to create some with netting or a wattle fence.

Most ordinary garden soils are fine for veg growing, but avoid extremes. If your soil is thin – less than a spit deep (the length of your spade’s blade), or full of stones that cause your carrots to kink, It means raised beds or pots.

Pruning is an essential gardening skill. When you prune correctly, you encourage healthy growth and flowering (in the case of flowering plants), as well as good looks. For most shrubs and trees, it helps to prune at the right time. Some are best pruned in winter; some right after flowering.

When it comes to shrubs, you just can’t beat cane-growing types like sweet-scented mock oranges

 (Philadelphusspp. and cvs.) or most viburnums

 (Viburnum spp. and cvs.) for seasonal interest and robust form in the landscape. Spouting from the ground like water from a majestic fountain, these multistemmed woody plants have a beautiful, natural, free-flowing habit. They’re easy to grow, and they usually achieve their mature size in three years. 

In late winter, prune the long shoots that have grown since the summer pruning down to three to five buds. Also remove any of last season’s unwanted long shoots, which will be more apparent now because the leafless framework will be exposed. In summer after the vines have flowered. prune this years growth long shoots back to 6 inches Also at this time, completely remove any shoots not needed for the main framework 

The majority of roses are pruned between late Feb and March 

You can't tar all rose varieties with the same bush though. Different types of rose will need to be pruned at different times of the year and in slightly different ways.

Climbers are happy with a late autumn and/or early winter pruning to keep them neat and tidy and flowering well. Whereas ramblers prefer pruning in late summer after their flowers have died out.

Group 1 vines flower in spring, on growth from the previous year.

Prune these vines right after they finish blooming in spring. The new stems that grow will then have enough time to make flower buds for the following year.

How much to remove when pruning depends on the vine’s vigor and how large a support you’ve provided for it. 

Lightly thin out and disentangle stems before growth begins in late winter or early spring, and then go over the plant again after the earliest flowers fade in late spring or early summer, severely shortening the stems that bore those flowers. If the plant tends to bloom more heavily later rather than earlier in the season, you can be more heavy-handed when thinning stems before growth begins in early spring.

These are the easiest vines to prune. Just before the season’s growth begins, or as it is beginning, lop all stems back to strong buds within a foot or so of the ground.

However, there is no need to cut a late-blooming clematis back so severely if you are going to let it ramble up into a tree where you want its blossoms held high.