What do you ask / expect your gardener to do?

[Wtfdoicare]

We are lucky to have a gardener come fortnightly for 2 hours, which probably isn't enough really for the size of the garden. In that time he cuts grass and does a small amount of weeding and pruning. We still have unruly flower beds, and have lost a lot of the shrubs we started out with. Unfortunately we need to find some time from somewhere to tackle it ourselves it seems!

Two hours a fortnight isn't that much, especially at this time of year when everything (including the weeds) is growing, I've found.

We started having a gardener in October. She comes weekly for 3.5 hours.

She started off by getting on top of a particular large section of the garden, chopping back substantially, thinning, weeding etc. Then in spring, she started planting what she and we had bought for the garden. Then she spent ages weeding.

Now she maintains the section of the garden that she had spent the most time on, and is working her way around the rest - again, cutting back, thinning, repositioning shrubs etc. Every two weeks, she cuts the grass.

Do you garden yourself? I ask as I never did. I have now started and I realize how hard work it is and how time consuming, and how long you need to spend actually maintaining what you did two weeks ago!

We have 2 guys who come for 5hours a fortnight but we have a huge garden with so much to do we are drowning.
I get them to do the heavy work setting them a task at a time.
At the moment they are clearing out a flowerbed (approx 25m x 10m) that was overrun with ivy, brambles and ground elder. They are leaving the decent mature plants that were being suffocated and then digging out the weeds & roots, turning over the soil and digging in compost (thankfully we have a large supply of our own) leaving it for me to plant up. They are going to start sorting out a pathway for me that gets overgrown easily by laying membrane and woodchippings.
We cut the grass ourselves as that's a relatively easy task (ride in mower) I want the gardener guys for their brawn

Thanks for the replies! No we don't garden at all ourselves. I feel quite daunted by it actually! I really want to get it all tidied up this summer, so it seems like we'll need to take the plunge.