Grass Cutting, Regular or One-Off
Some of this is routine — mowing and strimming through the growing season, edges kept tidy, cuttings cleared rather than left in clumps on the lawn. Some of it is a garden that's got away from someone over a season or two and needs bramble, scrub and rough grass cut back before it's a lawn again rather than a meadow. We quote both the same way: a look at the ground first, then a price, rather than guessing from a description over the phone.
Ground clearance often overlaps with tree work — a garden that's been left can have self-seeded saplings and overgrown hedges as well as long grass, so we'll flag if a job's really two jobs in one.
Ground conditions
Building on Heavy Clay
A lot of Aberdeenshire gardens sit on heavy clay that holds water through a wet spring and cracks hard in a dry summer — not the easiest base to landscape on without thinking about drainage first. For turfing and planting projects we look at how the ground drains before we start, and where it's genuinely waterlogged ground we'll build in land drains or raise a bed rather than lay turf straight onto standing water and watch it fail by June.
Turf is usually the better call than seed here — it gives you a lawn you can walk on within a couple of weeks rather than a bare patch that needs watering daily and staying off for a month. Seed's cheaper and works fine on lighter, free-draining ground, but it's the exception rather than the rule on the clay soils common around Mintlaw, Ellon and inland Aberdeenshire.
Coastal planting
Hedging and Shelterbelts for Exposed Sites
Gardens closer to the coast — Peterhead, Fraserburgh, Banff — take a battering from onshore wind that inland gardens don't. We tend to steer coastal planting toward hardier species that can take salt-laden wind without scorching: hawthorn and beech both make a solid windbreak hedge, and escallonia holds up well as an evergreen coastal screen. It's worth planting a shelterbelt before more delicate planting behind it rather than the other way round.
Common questions
FAQs
Both. Plenty of customers just want an overgrown garden brought back under control once, and plenty want regular cutting through the growing season — typically fortnightly from spring through to early autumn, less often either side of that. We're happy to quote either way.
For most of the heavier clay ground around here, turf. It gives you a usable lawn straight away and copes better with a wet spring than seed does, which needs weeks of careful watering and no foot traffic to establish. Seed is cheaper and fine on lighter, well-drained ground if you're not in a hurry.
Yes — bramble, scrub and rough grass clearance is often the first step before turfing, planting or groundwork, and we regularly pair it with tree or hedge work on the same visit if the garden needs both.
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