Another big thanks owed to Black & Decker for making this possible. I’m under no obligation to write about the 36V cordless hedge trimmer I received for free after attending a blogger event, but I’m doing it anyways, because just like the tiller I wrote about on Friday, this too is badass.
Or maybe the real thanks are owed to our neighbors, a nice family who legitimately has more important things to be concerned about than curb appeal. See, we don’t have hedges on our property. And yes, hedge trimmers could be useful for any number of backyard projects, like shaping my mini-Mountain Laurel plants and maybe for playing swords, but we wanted to give them a real workout. True story: Word on the street is that my neighbor’s row of hedges was once maintained to be just shorter than the chain link fence on their property. And up until late last week, the hedges stood tall, stretching nearly 11-feet high in some places. An eyesore. A Desperate Landscapes in the making. A yard maintenance afterthought for years, and years, and years.
Do you see where this is going? If not, this video should do the trick. It’s not even a minute-and-a-half long, and you can turn down the sound without losing effect, so enjoy it at the office if you so wish.
Pete’s G12 camera was stationed in the sunroom window for 90 minutes, which was the full length of time it took us to do the entire hedge trimming project. That also included us cleaning up the back side of the hedges on the family’s property, and string trimming along the base and curb, but the damn camera inexplicably stopped recording after just 23-minutes and I was having too much fun hauling armloads of branches to come back inside to check in on it like I should have. It was starting to rain outside only 15-minutes in and we just wanted to go-go-go. Good news is for the last 45-minutes of the job, my jeans had stretched out so much from bending and moving that I was pulling them up every 2 seconds. I thought it might have looked awk on camera, so maybe things worked out for the best. Overshare?
The good news is, these trimmers were awesome. If you couldn’t tell in the video, they cut like butter, and that’s so exaggeration, it was easy-breezy. Pete’s was working a little harder than mine, so while we started with two fully-charged 36V batteries, we swapped about 40-minutes into the job so that he could finish the project without having to miss a beat.
Using a 6′ ladder gave Pete enough height to cut 3-4 feet clean off the top while I cleaned up the lower parts with grandiose swishing motions to give it a good front. The whole project was a great feel-good workout, even if Pete did lose his balance and tumble in once. That didn’t feel so good. But there were no injuries, just scratches, and it only happened once, so, oh well.
The end results? So fresh and so clean-clean.
We’re still waiting on the city to pick up the pile of branches that stands as tall as my shoulders, but they’ll take care of it and we don’t have to dispose of it anywhere specific ourselves.
Update: Look who showed up this morning to eat branches for breakfast. Chomp-chomp. Best arcade game turned real-life job ever?
The main focus for this first go-around was to see just how low we could cut the shrubs without them becoming totally stickly (that’s stick-ly, not sickly, since the leaves are really only growing on the outermost sun-reaching branches what remains underneath are naked twigs).
Yes, there are some more barron spots, mostly in the out of control section that I was hacking at most aggressively, but we expect that the leaves will fill right in during the summer and by fall we might even be able to take it down another few feet.
One observation that Pete made was that since the hedges had been unattended for so long, the branches towards the top on the inside were mature and thick. The trimmer ate through branches that were 3/4″ in diameter with no problem, but the thicker ones might require a different when the time comes.
Second observation: the neighbors have a big beautiful posted light that would illuminate their driveway and sidewalk if it were exposed. We’re still about 3-feet away from getting it back into view. Who knew!
And then we took some photos just for fun.
I believe this was Pete’s DIY MCA tribute? All he’s missing is the fish-eye lens effect.
With all this said, it was a pleasure to be able to make someone else’s property look nicer. We’re so happy they let us tackle it instead of letting it go completely, or having a company charge big bucks to get the job done. Plus, now we know that the tools are great.
Anyone else spending time raging on the neighborhood landscaping?
3 Comments
Was it awkward asking/offering to do it? My hubs often wants to mow the neighbor’s lawn, since we know that he works 7 days a week, but we’re nervous about asking. We don’t want it to sound like “hey dude, your yard sucks,” but “I noticed you don’t have time to mow too frequently.”
So glad you got to put your tools to good use helping out a neighbor :)
Asking about the hedges wasn’t awkward at all, but it’s all circumstantial and we knew they needed the help. Asking a neighbor who does make efforts to mow the lawn but not that often seems like it’d be more awkward, although if it’s a small lot and easy for you to do without making a huge time investment maybe it’d be easier positioning it like “hey dude, you’re so busy, let us help you out with your front yard… we’ll mow it at the same time as ours, no biggie!”
Or just go ahead and mow the yard. We do that for each other in my neighborhood. It’s fun to surprise people with random acts of kindness!