AlfaDelta wrote:
Hi everyone,

I'm Steve and I'm from Newcastle upon Tyne. I've signed up to this
forum because, well, basically - I don't know what I'm doing - my
fingers are anything but green!


This has nothing to do with gardenbanter, that website is merely a portal
( a magic door!) to the real group called uk.rec.gardening, you can view
this and thousands of other groups covering as many subjects by opening
outlook express, creating a news account and subscribing to whichever groups
you like, your ISP will have help on this on their help pages.


I've got quite a small garden to the front of my house. It doesn't
get many hours of sun (due party to the location and partly to the
opposite neighbours inordinately huge headge!). At the moment it's
been left alone and looks a bit of a state, although last year I did
put a lovely fence up - lol.

If you want to get rid of the hedge, just have a word with your neighbour,
the chances are they don't care about it one way or the other and would be
glad to get it lopped, topped or dropped.

My grass is quite long, too long to cut with the mower I think! I'm
also sure that when I do cut it - it's going to be all brown/white
rather than green. Can anyone suggest anything I can do to help it?
Best ways of cutting it? Any treatments you can recommend/suggest?

Get a strimmer and get it as low as you can, don't worry about killing it or
what it will look like afterwards, it will almost always pick up again, even
if it's patchy for the first year or two...the other thing about leaving
grass to grow wild like this is that it causes unneveness of the soil
underneath, this will need flattening somehow, either by roller or any other
means you can think of so that you can mow it when it starts to regrow,
which won't be long now.


Also, when the weather improves I want to plant out my currently bare
borders. Does anyone have any recommendations for the best plants for
what is basically bad soil and not much light (I know that's not ideal
at all is it?)


I'm not very good with plants myself and choose to have bedding plants in
summer and bare earth in winter, mainly because I'm bone idle, if you want
shrubs or other stuff that stays in all year long, you'd be better having a
look around a nursery and picking out those that enjoy partial shade and
poor soil, there are lots that do....others here may know more about these
but be prepared for latinus namicus