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I've just taken on a new customer and her garden is totally weed infested with lots of the borders being more grass/weed than soil. The soil is horrible ,being a thick sticky clay. In a decent soil I'd usually weed kill and then hoe off the weeds and use a 3 tined cultivator to bring the soil to a fine tilth but the soil here is horrible,water logged and sticky clay so I used my "quick makeover" technique.

 

Rather than spend back breaking hours weeding I sprayed the borders 2 weeks ago with Roundup, being careful not to spray those plants/shrubs to be kept. Today all the weeds were dead. I used a strimmer to take all the weed growth nearly to the ground as you can see in the above photo .This is much faster and less hard work than digging up or hoeing off the top growth of dead weeds which are dead down to the root even in a light soil which this certainly isn't!

 

Then I spread a 1-2 inch thick layer of potting compost over the top of all the dead strimmed weeds. ( 2 inches is best but obviosly costs more in materials and labour.

 

The area I did today (in the photo above) took me 60 minutes to strim the thick weed growth in the border ,collect the compost from a local garden centre and then spread it.( say 45 minutes without the compost collection)

 

The long border running up the rhs of the photo is 8 metres by one metres and required three 60 litre bags of compost. The border you can see running horizontally in the photo has an area of 4 square metres and required a further 1..5 bags of compost.

 

The compost cost £5 per bag from a local garden centre. I could have bought it 50% cheaper from a DIY shed but that is 14 miles away so wasn't cost effective after taking into account my petrol and travelling time.

 

The photo above shows about two thirds of the front garden's borders.

 

The dead weed under the new compost will rot down and if a few perennial weeds survive the first treatment of Roundup I'll either dig them out or spray them off.

 

Within 4 weeks I expect this garden to be almost entirely weed free

 

Total cost of compost and labour was £35. I reckon another £25 will finish the front garden

 

The back garden is a little smaller so I expect the total job will cost the customer about £100 including labour which I reckon is pretty cheap to totally transform quite a large weed infested garden.

 

The front garden is 12 metres by 12 metres. Back garden 9 by 12 metres

 

I've agree to take on the maintenance of the whole garden from now on

 

Click on these two links to see "after" makeover photos

 

www.flickr.com/photos/31559373@N00/25671048534/in/datepos...

 

www.flickr.com/photos/31559373@N00/26256990245/

 

 

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Uploaded on April 5, 2016