Bees, brambles, husband... which is the problem??

[BornToBeStyled]

Please can you help me figure out an issue I feel that, at 48 years old, I should be able to figure out myself?

Garden extremely overgrown - mainly with brambles, but also any other manner of wild plants. It's truly wild.

So, I realise this is really lovely for the bees and birds. Chuffed about that.

But it's getting harder to sit in, and I don't like the brambles (even if the bees do love the flowers).

Would like to get on top of it ourselves, but it's just not happening (huge amounts on at work, ageing parents, tricky kids, etc). I never get time.

Friend of family looking for work. He's offered to come in and do some bramble clearance. I'm delighted - said yes.

Now husband really upset. Really upset about bees, making me feel like it's immoral and unreasonable to want garden not bordered entirely by metres of brambles (not growing up in lawn too, which is also massively overgrown). And now I'm anxious and upset about the bees, too. Will they die? Can they find somewhere else to go? I know it's a bad time of year to cut back, but it's also just before the summer, when I'd like the kids to be able to use the garden better.

Husband wants us to do "little bits together" (we might have an hour every 2 weeks, I reckon) - just not feasible IMHO (and annoys me when he knows how completely overwhelmed I'm feeling).

Opinions, please?

1. cut the brambles until they’re about 30cm high.
2. Use a big garden fork (not a hand held one but the type you use your foot to give it some welly) when the ground is wet to dig up as much root as possible. There’s a big knot of weeds under the plant, you need to dig that out as a bare minimum.
3. throw them on the bonfire. Don’t leave them hanging around as you don’t want them replanting themselves. Definitely don’t throw them on your compost. Depending how overgrown your area is you don’t get much brambles in the garden bin.
4. Don’t do just the odd hour here or there as they’ll fight back and just replant themselves.

Dig out the brambles and replant bee friendly plants.

We have tonnes of bees - fave plants are lavender, salivia (ours smells like blackcurrant / lemon / mint? ) and the wildroses

I would draw up a plan, work out what pollinater friendly plants, bird friendly shrubs you like, best place for them and when friend will start digging them out. Work out how to dispose of bramble and then start buying plants in pots, so once brambles are dug out, you can start planting straight away.

The children need to be able to use the garden so cutting back the brambles now is an excellent idea. This will reveal what other planting is currently smothered (we can help with id'ing any you don't recognise) Dig out the bramble roots in late autumn/winter once they go dormant. A sharp spade and maybe a few mates to help with the digging and heaving out the roots?

But for now, a useable garden is priority. It is neither immoral nor unreasonable to want this.

The bees will not die, they will forage elsewhere.

Your husband needs to give his head a wobble.

What is a garden at the end of the day? It is generally an enclosed piece of land that is cultivated for human pleasure or human food purposes. Gardens are not natural in the first place. Very few landscapes in the UK are actually as nature intended. Even heathland is maintained in that state by grazing or scrub clearance.

You are not harming bees by not providing them with everything they need in your own garden. They don’t care about boundaries and will just fly on to your neighbour or the house behind.

I used to worry about not providing drinking water for birds or animals, partly due to lecturing posts on MN and social media. Then I realised that the wildlife was actually completely fine as a) there is a stream behind my house and b) my neighbour has a pretty large pond! My concern was an utter waste of time.

Having a care for nature is a good thing, but we need keep our actions in perspective. The actions of large landowners (burning grouse moors!), farmers (ripping out hedgerows!) and corporations who own huge swathes of land (unsuitable development) are far more significant than you removing a few brambles in what sounds like a fairly modest garden.

I am not saying plaster everything in concrete or replace your lawn with astroturf, but if you rip out a few brambles the bees will just fly on to the next flowering plant, whether that is next door or somewhere else. They won’t wait around in your garden in a state of puzzlement or protest as to where their pollen source has gone, they will be absolutely fine!

Just go out with secateurs and cut back a bit at a time. Plant some bee friendly flowers like lavender in large manageable pots.

If it was me I would.

Buy a couple of the builders bag as pp mentioned ( or as on local facebook)Facebook.
Get heavy gloves and secateurs
Cut the brambles into sections easy to fit in the bag. This job is easy as a full bag is volume but light. Chip away at it filling a bag - it quite therapeutic- can you tell I've done this ! You don't need your DH to do this at the same time.
Then get the friend in to dig them up. No point unless you lift the roots.

If you did 30 mins a day you could clear in a week I reckon easy if garden not huge!

The bees will be just fine!

Thank you all so much.

Great instructions @Bloodybrambles

Perhaps then we could do at least some of the roots in autumn like @Hoydenish suggests if I can't get all this done straight away.

But this will allow the garden to be useable. And I will get some pollinator-friendly pots in for now. I might upload some "before" pictures to this thread....

Thanks again

He is of course making it up about the bees. Brambles only flower for a specific time, so if that's all you have in your garden, they will go hungry the rest of the time anyway. I have two plants where the flowers seem to last forever and the bees go nuts for them. A purple erysimum and a large bush fuchsia. Both are very low maintenance. I would consider something like that to create a big display and then potter round the edges with anything else you like. Hooray for bees.

Thinking about it, your husband is also embarrassed that random family friends have notices how bad the garden is?!

Not the question you asked but depends how overgrown the brambles are, be careful that there could be nesting birds!!
I’ve been very sadly caught out by this before

OP, we don’t have a garden or a bramble problem but I recently got some pots for the front of our house, some where I’ve planted seeds for (according the the garden centre) some bee-friendly flowers and one pot of ready grown lavender. Anyway, having never liked gardening really, I was disproportionately pleased with myself for doing this and absolutely delighted the other day when I saw that the lavender had attracted a bee! Point being that you can still definitely help the bees with your idea of pots or planting other things.

@BadSkiingMum · Today 08:45
I totally agree with your post.

We keep some, but not all and I plant thing that are pollinator friendly. You need to be super careful there aren’t any nests, but I’m sure your husband is all over that. If he’s as concerned about biodiversity as I am, he’ll get out there and do a good job of it.

Is it because you have got ‘a man in’ to do what he feels he should do? Maybe it’s not so much about the bees and more about him. My husband gets like this sometimes and I know what it’s really about.

If you cut the brambles as close to the ground as you can now and leave them the thorns will become dry and brittle in a few weeks and they are easier to handle.
We did this and the brambles did not re root themselves from what we had cut but it was a different time of year. It could be that in this season they will be more inclined to reboot.

Definitely get them dug out, they grow back very quickly... If there might be useful plants under there you could invest £20 or so in the app 'Picture This' for your friend - it's good at identifying plants and tells you what's usually considered a weed. He could dug up anything that falls on that list and leave anything else for further consideration without you needing to constantly oversee.

Get the friend to take out the brambles and plant other bee friendly plants instead.

Husband can help research and plant the alternatives.

Thank you very much. You all helped me get this going.

So... Is anyone still here? Friend has now started (husband is a bit sulky but OK), and is saying we should get a strimmer, and that he can pick us up a good one, and it will help get everything in shape. This has set husband off again about the undergrowth. Friend has said he will check thoroughly for hedgehogs etc before using it. I can see why he doesn't want to do it all by hand. Now we're at stalemate again! Is strimmer unreasonable?! Help!

Can you take a photo of the area? I think it’s pretty difficult to give an opinion on the impact of this on wildlife without seeing the area.

Right, yes, I'll do this ASAP... thanks...

I know your friend is not a gardener, but he's clearly realised it's harder work than he thought 😂 as an inexperienced gardener I wouldn't trust him to not cut through the cord tbh. What is he cutting it with, secateurs? Extending loppers would be easier.

I’m with your husband on strimmers. Bloody awful things for wildlife appreciate this is not helpful

If those are well-established brambles a typical strimmer won't do the trick anyway. Bramble stems can be really quite tough. If there's so much to do that power tools are appropriate then a brush cutter or good hedge trimmer would be better.

Our bumble bees love borage if that's any help. Once the plant has finished flowering and has died back it can be composted and is full of nutrients.

Bees also like comfrey.