Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Ditching power tools made me a happier gardener

Hedge trimmers, shredders and chainsaws are all meant to make gardening easier, but when Julian Rollins switched to hand tools, he discovered the joys of a slow and steady approach

Putting weekend papers into the recycling bin, an advert caught my eye. Among a tumble of sections of The Guardian and another, rival, publication, was a motoring section. Its back page was given over to an ad for gardening gadgets; strimmers, leaf-blowers and mowers, all beefed-up and top-of-the-range, presumably selected to catch the eye of the Top Gear set.

How different my last few months would have been if I’d had that “firepower” to hand. Our garden isn’t big, but we have lots of hedge. Actually, nearly all the boundary of our long, skinny property is hedge. That means one of the big jobs of the gardening year is hedge-taming. Until recently that involved two or three days of sustained slog with power trimmer, shredder and, here and there, a chainsaw. This year, though, it has taken a little longer. I started in September - and am still at it.

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from Gardening blog | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2ijRpc1

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