Neighbours never cut their grass.

[Shootingstar1115]

When I say never, I mean never. It’s a jungle out there. They are busy working people, I understand it’s hard to keep on top. We aren’t keen gardeners ourselves but manage to cut the grass and keep it looking half presentable.

They don’t maintain their garden at all. It’s causing all sorts of plants and brambles to grow through the fence into our garden which we can trim to a certain extent but both my kids have scatched themselves and recently our dog had a nipple injury - large scratch/cut after coming in from the garden. Obviously we don’t know for sure it’s that but she often jumps up to the fence if she hears other dogs/people/cats nearby (not that she can see them 🤣) and it seems likely she injured herself that way.

My kids have also accidentally chucked balls over there but you can’t see them to find them so we’ve just left them in there for now 🤣

I feel like helping them out with it but it will be a large job and myself and Oh lack the time nor are we keen gardeners ourselves.

Would you be annoyed??

CassianAndor of course not. There of course is the Inbetweeners. With cultivated gardens, designed to attract wildlife.
I was merely pointing out that imo, over grown is better than the other extreme.

was merely pointing out that imo, over grown is better than the other extreme

It's not a race to the bottom, both are bad and for different reasons. The point of the thread is not the op would like them to get rid of the brambles and weeds and throw down some plastic grass instead.

It most definitely does affect house sales. My neighbour's garden both front and back is totally overgrown. The front lawn grass is about 3 foot high at the moment. The house the other side is for sale, and one further up the road, and multiple viewers have all stated that they were put off by the scruffy garden. The back is so overgrown that you can't see into it and any balls that end up there are never seen again.

It has caused a lot of bad feeling in our road, where lots of people keep their front gardens lovely and tidy. Personally it doesn't bother me at the moment, but I am sure it would if I wanted to sell and people were being put off by it. There was also a bad rat problem and people reported her, but it turned out to be a garden backing onto hers that was the main problem.

My neighbour has refused all offers of help though. Another neighbour did eventually mow the front lawn by stealth one day by doing it after she had gone out . Nobody ever admitted to her who had done it.

OP, regarding items growing over your fence, you can trim them back and then they can't hurt your kids or pets. YWNBU to offer help, they may be very grateful, or they may tell you to sod off.

After my ex husband left, I didn't mow the front lawn for ages and a very kind neighbour offered to do it for me. I was grateful to him. I now pay somebody to do it every few weeks.

*I think it should be much cheaper to get you garden paved or gravelled over, so if you CBA with it you can have this done.

The thing is its so expensive to have anything done that people just don't bother.It can run into hundreds just for a basic tidy up.*

Paving your garden shouldn't be cheaper. We have huge environmental problems. Gardens cover so much land, especially in cities (e.g. 24% of London is private gardens), that paving them over has a negative impact on temperature, flood management, air quality. They also provides feeding and nesting places for wildlife which is in catastrophic decline. I don't care if people have weedy, overgrown gardens, but I do think that if you are lucky enough to own/rent some green space with your home, you have a responsibility to keep it green for all of the above reasons.

If you dislike gardening & really think gardeners are overpaid, maybe find someone local who wants to grow things but doesn't have access to a garden. They get to enjoy gardening and you get to enjoy the results - win win.

I am fascinated by "huge overgrowth encouraged rats and other vermin".

What other vermin is that?

We get rats coming through the garden (there is a Domino pizza at the bottom of the garden and they don't seem to be terribly careful about what they throw away or in what sort of container, so of course there are rats in the gardens all around them) but I am trying to think what other vermin would be particularly attracted by an overgrown garden. Um. Cockroaches? You won't as a rule get mice where there are rats, as far as I know. Ferrets, stoats and weasels? They seem a little improbable in an urban garden....

When we moved into this house, the entire back garden was a rather scruffy lawn, with a magnolia tree in one corner and a flowering cherry planted about two foot from the foundations of the house. After a bit we got fed up with it, had the lawn removed (some blokes came and rolled it up and took it away in a pick-up) and rotivated the area, then bought seeds for a mix of nineteen flower species and six grasses and threw the seeds on the bare ground and left it alone unwalked on for six weeks.

We also bought a scythe.

Each year since has had one flower dominating: one year we had ox-eye daisies up to our waists in a solid mass, for instance. And this year for the first time we had cowslips in the spring. It gets scythed down twice a year to give the next lot a chance to grow, once in June and once in late September, and otherwise it is left to its own devices and to the birds, bees and butterflies.

The only real problem we have is a gurt bramble which has come in from the immaculately-manicured garden next door, where it was growing between their shed and our fence next to the magnolia, and which has got a hold inside the magnolia where we didn't see it. I am not sure what to do about it, to be honest; getting rid of it is going to be a hellish labour, because just unwinding it from the tree before it strangles it will be arduous and probably painful, and the root is in someone else's garden under her shed, where she can't get at it. Someone upthread said cut it back as far as you can and then put herbicide inside a bag round the top of the stems that are left, I think, and that's the first real hope I have heard about it all year, so thank you.

And paving/gravel is all very well, but if you think it keeps weeds from growing you have never had it! All that happens is you get weeds you can't dig up and so you can't get rid of them properly, and to keep them down you either use shedloads of poison or you spend a lot of time pulling them out every time they appear, which is hard work. And if it is paving stones the ants nest under them and they subside.

To grow a proper wildflower meadow is actually quite hard and a lot of work to get established.
Not cutting you grass and letting the weeds take over is not a wild flower meadow.
It is a mess as some body can’t be bothered to maintain their property.

My 80+ year old neighbour's garden is a mess and the brambles come over the top. Best thing I've found is to cut them but in a way that you bend them back onto your neighbour's side. That helps create a kind of barrier and reduces the amount that make it over as they are caught in this self made net.

That said, the brambles are now pushing at the fence which looks likely to split and it's only been put up 3 years ago (at his cost). The weight of them on the other side has already pushed the fence onto our right of way passage down that side of his house (mid terrace).

The solution to the front garden is to stealth mow it when they're out!

Wow, I posted yesterday about struggling to do my gardening due to grieving.
I got some nice responses telling me to leave it, it’ll be fine etc.

From reading some of the awful, judgemental comments on here I can see that was because people knew about my grieving.

Seriously, you have no idea what people are dealing with (some of PP, not necessarily OP)

I don’t even look at other people’s gardens. I don’t actually get this thread. Why does it concern you what someone else does with their garden! So judgy.

Those of you living next door to elderly neighbours, why don't you offer to do their lawn for them say, once a month? I'm sure they would gratefully accept.

If it is me, I am sorry. Don't have any energy to mow the lawn these days - and quite honestly, prefer the wild look with the lush emerald grass instead of runty tufts of green here and there (and if you mow once a month, that's exactly how it would look like).

My grass is waist high. (But I am very short).

I really want to cut it but we never get a few days together so the grass can dry out and and we can cut it.

Also we have been away and it seems to have grown massively since we have been away.

Dp is terminally ill and now isn’t capable of doing anything.

The dc help out when they can but with jobs and GCSEs their time is limited so I am left to do the housework, cooking, shopping, painting, all the diy (house in need of s lot of finishing off), and all the garden. 1/4 acre which has been partially landscaped at the back and needs completely landscaping at the front. Then I have a separate 1 bed annex which needs renovating and the whole of the outside needs painting.

I feel I am overwhelmed sometimes with it all.

Add to that my crippling insomnia and you can see how frustrated I can get.

So calling someone a scratter until you have walked in their shoes is just name calling for the sake of it.

Don’t ask me to get a Gardner. I have given up. They either don’t want the job or come round and arrange to start then don’t turn up.
It is a waste of time. Time I could use to actually do one of the thousands of jobs I need to do.

Oliversmumsarmy that sounds tough. I hate the stress the pressure to keep a ‘neat garden’ places on people. For all this judging as you can see on this thread, you have no idea what people are facing in their private lives. Some have other priorities rather than weeding every week which is a bloody thankless task.

Agree, I have even tried to throw money at it but can’t find a decent gardener to turn up and not rip me off.

I would never think of having an opinion anyone else’s garden.

What I do is 20 minutes or 1/2 hr here and there to keep on top of the garden. Its too much thinking of doing the whole thing at once. Also getting some rigger gloves and general gardening gloves has helped as I hate having my hands in and near soil.

Our garden is horribly overgrown. We don't have the time to be out there every day/week, and we find that after spending hours sorting it out, it only takes a couple of days of rain and there it all is again. I lost all interest in trying to make it nice when our NDN chopped down all the 8ft hedges around her garden so she can stare at us every time we go outside. (and so can her NDN on her other side).

NDN our other side is always out there mowing and clipping. Yet after we'd spent a week cutting down and clearing all the brambles in our garden, and making multiple trips to the tip to get rid of it, he cut back those on his side, and left all the mess on our side of the wall! (They were growing in their garden but so big they'd come over our side. They just chopped them off at the roots and left them there so they were our problem).

NDN in our previous house were as judgemental as the posters on this thread and reported us to Environmental Health as they had rats in their garden, which must have come from us . Ignoring the fact we had 2 cats who were excellent killers, we'd never seen any rats so were most bemused when the EH turned up.

Off he went into our garden for a scout around, looked in the shed and under the decking; no sign of anything. Turned out the rats were nesting under NDNs own shed . I would love to have seen her smug face when EH told her that. I missed my chance to say nah-nah na nah-na.

I have a ten month ld it's impossible for me to do gardening unless it's 9pm as I work full time and dp works weekends. I hate our overgrown garden but ds never naps for long and I barely have time. I try my best but it's a bit judgy.
They could have limited mobility, caring commitments for older relatives or anything.
Kid soffering for pocket money is a good idea

20 minutes wouldn’t even make a dent on our garden. I do mow the lawn and that takes me 45 minutes every other week (and it is a struggle to find this time). To keep on top of the weeds out the front and back would be at least an hour of back breaking work every week. Then they appear again about a week later. I hate it! That’s not to mention the hedges and cutting back everything, strimming etc. DH says he doesn’t have the time to do any of it. It all falls to me. I don’t have time either with work/dog/kids/housework. Still trying to find a gardener!

Oliversmumsarmy.

Thank you mathanxiety

I worked on our garden a few weeks ago just before we went away.

I cleared one pathway down one side of the house. Approximately 50 ft long a big flower bed that was knee high with nettles.
The decking which is about 12ft wide and runs l across the back of the house (about 30ft) and down to the summer house, (About 80 ft) was full of brambles and nettles growing over the decking.

I spent probably 10 days over the course of a month trying to battle my way through the jungle.

The decking is relatively clear but everything else is now worse than before.

20 -30 minutes now and then wouldn’t touch it.

To grow a proper wildflower meadow is actually quite hard and a lot of work to get established.
Not cutting you grass and letting the weeds take over is not a wild flower meadow.
It is a mess as some body can’t be bothered to maintain their property. So how do you tell the difference between a weed and a wild flower?

Thats true re wildflowers meadows

Bloody hard work to establish

But as my enviro friend told me there is no such thing as weeds ! They are all plants 🌱

Weeds are just flowers growing in the wrong place was what my ma said.

It took three years for our not-a-lawn to get established, and for two of them we were wondering whether we'd made a terrible mistake.

My front garden is part of what was farmland, my grass is meadow and because it's been so wet its grown rapidly over the last week and I have a lawn that is purely buttercups, clover and other wildflowers.

I'm ever so torn because whilst I want to mow, I don't want to get rid of the beautiful flowers. Thankfully this week is going to be too wet to mow so I shall enjoy the buttercups.

Weeds are just flowers growing in the wrong place was what my ma said

Which is sweet but they usually aren't. Many of them are hugely invasive, they certainly don't flower, some even strangle other plants others the sap is dangerous and some can even damage buildings and foundations if left. Often they are also hugely unsightly.

The op isn't talking about a typical over grown garden though. She's talking about a garden so over grown the brambles are coming through thr fence.

As for the person who said they never look st someone's else's garden, how is this even humanly possible, do you walk about with your eyes on the ground?