Most people think of hedge work as a spring job and get it exactly backwards. The window for cutting a hedge hard is winter, and by the time the weather is pleasant enough to want to be outside doing it, the window has closed. Hedge cutting waste is also one of the heaviest garden loads we handle, particularly around here where the hedges are mature and the ground holds water. Our Formby skip hire service is busiest for this between the new year and the end of February.
Why the timing matters more than people realise
Birds nest in hedges, and it is an offence under the Wildlife and Countryside Act 1981 to damage or destroy an active nest while it is in use. The main nesting season runs roughly from March through to August, which is precisely when most people feel like tackling the garden.
That leaves the autumn and winter months as the sensible window for any serious hedge work, and January in particular. The hedge is dormant, the structure is visible without the leaf cover getting in the way, and there is no nesting question to worry about. If you are cutting anything back hard rather than giving it a light trim, this is when to do it.
Formby has a lot of mature boundary planting, and hedges here that have been left for a few years get away from people quickly. The sandy soil and the shelter from the pinewoods make for good growing conditions, which is lovely until you are the one trying to reclaim two metres of it.
Leylandii is a job of its own
If you have leylandii coming out, plan for considerably more waste than you expect. It is dense, it is resinous, the branches are stiff and springy, and it does not compact in a skip the way softer garden waste does. A run of overgrown leylandii along one boundary regularly produces more volume than the entire rest of a garden clearance.
Cut it into short lengths as you go rather than throwing whole branches in. This is dull advice and it is the single thing that most affects how much you fit in the skip. Long springy branches create voids and hold everything else apart, and a skip loaded that way is half air.
The other thing about leylandii is that it does not come back from a hard cut. Unlike privet, laurel or beech, which will regenerate from old wood, leylandii cut back past the green will stay brown. So if the plan is to reduce rather than remove, get advice before the saw comes out, because there is no undoing it.
What actually makes a green waste load heavy
Green waste seems light and it is, right up until two things happen to it.
The first is rain. Winter cuttings sitting in a heap for a fortnight before they go in the skip absorb a great deal of water, and a soaked green load is dramatically heavier than the same material cut and loaded the same day. If you are stockpiling before the skip arrives, keep it covered or keep it off the ground.
The second, and this is the big one, is soil. If you are grubbing out stumps rather than just cutting back, every root ball comes up with a substantial quantity of earth attached, and around here that earth will be wet. A dozen root balls will do more to the weight of a skip than the entire hedge above them did. Knock as much soil off as you reasonably can before loading, and if you are taking out a long run of hedge, tell us, because that changes the size we would recommend.
For a hedge reduction with cuttings only, our garden waste skip hire service handles it comfortably. For a full removal with stumps and root balls, an 8 tonne builders skip is the safer call.
Keeping the load clean is worth doing
Green waste on its own is one of the most useful materials we receive, because it composts and it does so properly. The moment fence panel offcuts, plastic sheeting, old netting or bits of concrete post go in with it, that stops being true and the whole load has to be treated as mixed.
It is a small discipline that makes a real difference at our end. If the job is producing both green waste and hard waste, keep them in separate piles as you work and it costs you nothing. Our environmental and recycling page explains what happens to a clean green load once it reaches our site.
If you are replanting afterwards, we also supply screened top soil, which saves a separate trip and a separate delivery charge.
Where the skip goes
Formby sits within Sefton borough, so a skip on the road here needs a permit from Sefton Council at £36 per month, and the process is the same one covered in our guide to skip permits in Southport.
Most gardens here have driveway room, which avoids all of that. The consideration in January is the ground rather than the space. Sandy soil drains well, which helps, but a lawn is still a lawn in midwinter and we would rather board a driveway than put a loaded skip on grass.
Local coverage and getting the size right
We cover the coastal stretch daily, running Ainsdale skip hire and Southport skip hire work alongside Formby, and our drivers know the lanes and the narrower roads around the older parts of the village well enough to advise on access before we set off.
Ring us on 01704 779345 and tell us roughly how many metres of hedge you are dealing with and whether the roots are coming out. That is all we need to size it properly. Our contact page works just as well if you would rather send a photograph of what you are up against.
