A few weekends ago my old hedge trimmer finally gave up the ghost as I was trimming the thorny hedge outside our house. It was unfortunate as I was in the process of trimming the last part of the hedge. So I made my way to my laptop and proceeded to look for a new hedge trimmer online. It then occurred to me that I had seen a hedge trimmer called the Garden Groom advertised on a flyer I had seen from some mail order company. I had recalled that not only did it cut your hedge but it also shredded all the trimmings and placed them in a handy bag! Now that was a great idea! When trimming the hedge it's a task that usually takes a whole day which involves me cutting the hedge and my wife placing these through a garden shredder as we go. It usually ends with both my wife and I trying to feed the piles of hedge trimmings through the shredder which jams every now and again. The whole process leaving us with pierced hands from the thorns on the branches and pretty much exhausted from the whole process. I decided to nip down to Home Base to pick one up but was surprised that Home Base didn't stock them...odd why?

Oh well I ended up ordering one online from www.greenfingers.com and being the gadget person I am I decided to go for the Garden Groom Pro version which came with its own collection bag...groovy! Anyway then it arrived in a neat little package a few weeks later and I took it out for a test run, so what's the verdict?

The Verdict

Well firstly it's a lot heavier than my old Black & Decker and secondly it's a lot louder, to be precise its 96db which is as loud as my edge trimmer. The other thing is it vibrates so much that after a few minutes of usage your arms start to feel like jelly. Okay after you have read that you are probably thinking against purchasing it. Well other than those things, it does a pretty good job at shredding those hedge trimmings finer than my shredder does.

Well I suppose if you are going to combine a shredder and a hedge trimmer into one unit you are going start suffering a bit of vibration and I was struggling to see how the lady in the demonstration videos was able to effortlessly use it. I'm guessing this could have been the standard edition. I will later try to post a video of my wife using the Garden Groom to prove my point when we get to cutting the hedge again. To be fair I haven't used it to trim the whole hedge only the part left over from where my old hedge trimmer died. I'll post an article after using it to trim the whole hedge later.