Belsize Park Garden Maintenance

Love a neat garden but hate gardening? We’ll make your outdoor space work for you!

Remember to feed when you prune

Plant tip: Plants that require hard pruning also need generous feeding. Apply slow release fertiliser to hedges, clematis, and hydrangeas.

Book a Garden Clean and Clear

Spring is coming! Is your garden ready? Book a garden prune and clean today

Patio Cleaning in Hampstead

Has your patio turned green over the winter? Contact us and let us restore it with a deodorising jet spray.

Hedgehoggs Gardening Solutions: Early Spring Rose Care

Because the weather has been so mild this year, at Hedgehoggs gardening we delayed pruning established rose beds in the autumn as we waited for hard frost and winter to set in.  As spring starts to dawn, we're now ramping up our rose pruning more. In gardens subject to late, hard frosts, we would normally delay pruning until the end of March, but we don't think our London gardens are under much threat of that this year.

If roses are not pruned every year they can become full of dead and diseased wood, tangled in an unshapely mess. Without pruning, blooms become progressively smaller and because they are grown on weak shoots, their bloom time can be much shorter as well. Pruning every year not only gets rid of dead damaged wood, but as encourages healthy shapely growth.

Using sharp secateurs, we're now shortening long growths on bush roses to between 2-3 ft high to prevent wind damage, pruning newly planted and established standards, hybrid tea and floribunda bushes, miniature roses, established repeat-flowering shrub roses and repeat flowering climbers. (Climbers and weeping standards which only bloom once a year should not be pruned now.)

Where roses have black spot, we collect the leaves and burn them. Removal of leaf litter and diseased canes back to healthy wood is vital for reducing the spread of the disease in the year to come. Keeping rose bushes pruned well and deadheaded will help the airflow through the bush also helping prevent black spot and other fungal diseases.

Have some questions about rose care or need some help pruning your roses? Contact Hedgehoggs Gardening today!

Photo: Shutterstock

Made to measure garden storage

Do you need rubbish bin storage? We build bespoke, made to measure rubbish and bike storage.

Hedgehoggs Gardening Solutions: Tue Tip: Pot 'em Up

Photo: InstantHedges.co.uk

While you can plant container grown trees and shrubs all year round, now is the ideal time to put them in the ground. Because they are 'hibernating', container plants are much more likely to establish better and may not need as much water in the first summer because there will be plenty of new root growth made before the season warm up. Make sure you dig a wide enough hole for additional fresh soil and that the hole is of similar depth to the container.

Not sure what you want to plant? Give us a call and let Hedgehoggs Gardening Solutions help.

On the Move: Replanting Deciduous Trees & Shrubs

Winter is a good time of year to move deciduous trees and shrubs that have either outgrown their original space or are struggling in their current location.

When planting, as tempting as it is to design a garden with plants perfectly in location, at Hedgehoggs Gardening we usually try to give plants some room to grow into so we're not replanting and moving things every year. But there comes a time when a little plant has had a significant growth spurt and no longer fits its bed and needs to be relocated.

As experts in planting, we analyse soil, light and water conditions before planting plants but despite this sometimes even we get it wrong and a plant won't like it's allocated spot. As we mentioned in a previous post, if your plant isn't thriving in its current location, it's best to move it to a better spot before it decides to give up on its own.

Now is the perfect time of year to move trees that have lost their leaves.

When moving large plants, make sure you lift plants using a proper lifting technique and enlist some help from a friend (or give Hedgehoggs a call!) if you need it.  It takes a lot of effort and strength to move plants because you want to take as much of the root ball and soil as possible.

Moving a plant now makes it more likely that the plant's new root structure will grow and expand into the new soil around it, helping resestablish the plant, once spring comes and it begins to grow again.

Fence Repair and Installation North London

Is your fencing wobbly? Have us repair it before winds knock it down. Maintenance is cheaper than rebuilding.

Hedgehoggs Gardening Solutions: Time to Mulch!

There are so many great reasons to mulch your garden, we almost don't know where to start! There is a vast difference between how productive and vibrant a client's garden is in the spring, summer and autumn when it has been mulched, versus how it performed the season before if it wasn't mulched.

Mulching helps retain water and prevents water from evaporating as quickly from the base of plants. This means that you have to water less and end up with healthier plants. Mulch also moderates the soil temperature of your beds, keeping the soil cooler in summer and warmer in winter. It enriches the soil with organic nutrients which helps encourage greater plant growth. With mulch in place, gardens experience less water run off, as it can help even out landscape.

But what most of Hedgehoggs' Gardening clients love about mulching is the fact that garden plants and flowers thrive and are more productive after mulching, while at the same time the garden has less weeds. Plants flowers more, for longer, with larger flowers and the mulch suffocates and suppresses weed growth making gardens look neat and tidy.

Sometimes clients are reluctant to mulch because of the perceived extra cost of mulching, but to be honest, people who have gardeners and don't mulch usually end up paying more over the course of the year in added gardening time spent weeding. So in the end, mulching also works out to be more cost-effective as well.

It's a win-win-win situation all around!

The mulch we recommend is a mixture of horse manure and peat that was used to grow mushrooms. Mulching is therefore a rather stinky and messy job! If you'd like us to do it for you, please contact Hedgehoggs Gardening. We're happy to get dirty for the sake of a good garden!

Photos: Shutterstock, Hedgehoggs

10 things to do in your garden this Feb

The weather in February can be pretty dreary at times but it is well tended to, there's no reason why your garden can't provide a bright spot for you this month. Spring is just around the corner and in order to make the most of the bounty that a spring garden has to offer, now is the time to put the hard work in (or hire someone like us to do it!) There's loads to be done before things start growing again; realistically it's only a few weeks time before the growing season starts kicking off.

Our top 10 things to do in the garden this February are:
1. Clean/Jet spray algae off of wooden garden furniture and stone patios
2. Mulch garden beds
3. Apply fertiliser to plants that have been hard pruned
4. Prune whisteria
5. Coat wood furniture with oil
6. Cut back summer-flowering clematis
7. Hoe through areas of loose gravel to disrupt first weed seedlings
8. Finish pruning roses
9. Top up food and water for garden birds
10. Prune off old stems of herbaceouds perennials

Contact Hedgehoggs Gardeners if you'd like help with your garden.