Discovering our garden with HIPPOBAG [Review]

It’s kind of hard to believe we’ve lived in this house now since August 2020, a whole 8 months that have flown by. While we’ve tried to make some budget changes, like painting my home office and upcycling our bedroom furniture, the garden has been a job we’ve tackled one step at a time.

To say it was overgrown was probably an understatement. It seemed like at one time, someone spent a lot of money and we have some really amazing plants: a buddleia, fuchsia, yuccas, laburnum, yews, magnolia, crab apple tree and more!

But it’s been left to its own devices and grown just a little too far. When we first viewed the house, this is one of the images I took:

It’s pretty terrible quality, but the yew in the bottom left was around 9ft wide and 6ft deep, the yuccas have been almost completely swallowed up by brambles and the crab apple tree was being smothered by ivy. Yet this is how it looks today:

As I said, this change hasn’t happened overnight, and it’s taken a lot of digging, but we did eventually uncover the grass (joking).

I think we were both very conscious of getting to know the garden before we made any drastic changes. We wanted to see where the sun rises and sets, the areas that are in shade and those in full sun and how the current layout works.

Cleaning up with HIPPOBAG

But all that garden waste won’t fit into one garden bin.

So when HIPPOBAG got in touch for a collaboration, I desperately needed them and jumped at the chance! We’d used them before during our last home renovation as they’re significantly cheaper than hiring a skip but you can fit a lot in one bag. We ordered the MEGABAG, which is the middle size, but you can also get a smaller one or a bigger one, depending on what you need it for.

The bag comes in the post, and all you do is unfold it, place it near the road then get filling!

With the amount of work we did, it didn’t take long to fill the HIPPOBAG with branches, ivy, shrubs and more.

Once full, all I had to do was call the number on their site and provide my address for collection. I was told the bag would be collected within 3-5 days. The day before the collection, I received a text message to say it would be collected the next day, which was a nice touch. As long as the bag is next to the road, you don’t need to be in for the collection.

Without HIPPOBAG, we would have made about a thousand trips back and forth to the tip so they saved us a big job.

While rediscovering our garden, I actually found a path that was completely hidden by plants, and am hoping to uncover the rest!

Jet washing our block paving

As with the rest of the garden, the block paving had been left for quite some time, and was covered in mud and sprouting moss.

But I don’t think either of us realised quite how bad it was until we started to jet wash it.

We weren’t entirely sure what colour it was even supposed to be, but let’s just say my newly painted door didn’t look great with the dirty paving in front of it.

But after a LOT of jet washing (two rounds of it), then a clean with brick acid followed by new silica sand in the gaps, our block paving looks incredible.

Turns out, it’s light grey with a pink border!

We still have a long way to go (as you can see from the state of our front garden in the above photo) but I loved when that magnolia tree bloomed this spring! Luckily, HIPPOBAG has allowed us to get a great head start.