Dealing with an overgrown garden - help!

[BramblyMess]

We've just moved house, one of the main reasons being to have more garden space. In a rose-tinted glasses kind of way, I'd thought of the garden as being a sort of "blank slate" where I could just dig out some lovely borders and start planting pretty much straight away . However the reality is totally different!

There are loads of brambles, weeds growing among the grass etc, and some random shrubs (possibly blow ins?!) - that I want to cut back or etc rid of altogether.

So my question is: where do I start? I was thinking of getting rid of the bigger brambles etc and strimming the grass first, would that be the way to start? And then weed the lawn? Can I do it in small chunks (like a couple of hours a day) or do we need to blitz it as quick as possible to stop weeds etc coming back?

We only have basic garden tools so I'd need to buy/hire a strimmer etc.

I do want to dig out borders but first I think I need to make it usable overall IYSWIM.

My DH was suggesting just getting a mini digger and digging the whole thing up, then putting turf down. That seems a bit drastic to me but I would appreciate any thoughts!

Is it doable or do we need to get the professionals involved?!

TIA

Yes good idea to do a bit more planning first - and looking out from upstairs was good too

We bought our house for the garden - a canal side one - and I started planning the moment we stepped into the car after the first viewing. I knew exactly what we could do to have both the borders and the veg that we both wanted. We didn't want a straight path, we wanted the veg and borders separate and we had to do it on a budget. We didn't want lawn. We already had a decking area that we could sit next to the canal on. We had an old apple tree that had to stay for the time being.

If you tackle the brambles and grass and see where you are it should help.

That sounds fab sackrifice. We've just moved from a house v near to a canal strangely enough - no canal-side garden though!

Thanks for your thoughts, it's all been really helpful - I feel better about it all with a bit more of a plan. Now just got the work to do!!

Thanks again

Just in case anyone is in a similar situation with an old neglected garden, I'm just popping back to say the Old Garden New Gardener book is brilliant.

I think it might be out of print tbh but I ordered it from world of books for a couple of quid.

Anyway it's got loads of helpful advice about dealing with the different things you might find in an old garden, whether it's over-matured, or just neglected, full of brambles, bindweed, old tree stumps, etc and how to deal with that, and plan and create something you want. It also gives advice on eg digging up the entire lawn v just weeding it, and the pros and cons of each approach.

We've done a mixture of the two and are getting some turf to put down in the next few weeks, as well as keeping a few things I thought we wouldn't (but getting rid of others). So it still a bit of a mission but so far so good!

(I'm still a bit disappointed I couldn't hire the goats though!)