Hedge & Bush Trimming In Salisbury

Hedge work in northern Adelaide is generally charged at around $70 to $120 an hour or quoted for the whole project, and smaller jobs such as a short front hedge start from around $60. Height and access are the two things that move the price most, because anything above shoulder height needs ladder work and a narrow side path slows the clean-up down considerably. Green waste is quoted separately and clearly, typically $30 to $80 a trailer load, with smaller volumes going free into your council green organics bin. Call Mitesh on 0406 147 913 and we will give you a fixed written price after seeing the hedge.

Formal hedges such as photinia, murraya and box look their best on two to three trims a year, typically after the spring growth flush, again in mid-summer and a tidy before winter. Screening hedges like lilly pilly and pittosporum can usually get away with two cuts a year, and natives such as westringia and bottlebrush are better with one light prune after flowering than with regular shearing. Leaving a fast-growing screening hedge for more than a year is what turns a routine trim into a hard cut-back, which costs several times as much. We can put your hedges on the same schedule as your regular maintenance visits so it simply never gets to that point.

It depends entirely on the species and how far back you go. Lilly pilly, pittosporum, oleander and photinia will generally reshoot well from green wood and take a solid reduction without any real risk, though they will look bare for a month or two. Cutting back into old bare timber is the real danger, because most common screening species will not reshoot from wood that has no foliage on it, and you end up with a permanent hole. Conifers and most cypress hedges are the classic example, they simply do not come back from brown wood, so those are reduced gradually or not at all. We will tell you honestly before we start whether your hedge can take the cut you are asking for.

Yes, every job includes clearing the trimmings, and we never leave a pile on the driveway. Where the volume fits, we load them into your council green organics bin, which for City of Salisbury households is the free NAWMA food and garden organics bin collected fortnightly and which accepts prunings, leaves and clippings. Where a hard cut-back produces more than the bin will take, we haul it away ourselves and dispose of it properly, typically $30 to $80 a trailer load. That figure goes on the written quote before we start, so it is never a surprise added at the end.

For most formal and screening hedges, the ideal windows are after the spring growth flush and again in early autumn, when the plant has energy to recover but is not being pushed into new growth in extreme heat. Hard reductions are best done in the cooler months, because fresh cut surfaces and newly exposed inner foliage can scorch badly in a 40-degree Salisbury summer. Natives are trimmed lightly after they finish flowering, which keeps their shape without cutting off next season's buds. We avoid heavy hedge work in the middle of a heatwave, and we will say so rather than take the booking and damage the plant.

Look at the base of the hedge. If there is still green foliage low down, it can almost always be brought back with a staged reduction over one or two seasons and that is far cheaper than replanting. If the bottom metre is bare woody stems with all the growth sitting on top, the hedge has been cut vertically for years and no amount of pruning will re-clothe it. Disease, dieback in patches and a species that was simply wrong for the spot are the other three reasons we will recommend replacing. A new hedge of decent nursery stock, planted properly into conditioned clay and set up on dripline, will usually screen again within two to three years, and we will give you the honest comparison when we quote.