It was time to trim the hedges as must be done every year. If I neglect to do that, the hedges will grow horizontal branches with berries on them and the driveway becomes narrow in one place.
Trimming the hedges is best done in April in our climate because it is already reasonably warm but there are no leaves, yet. Crushing the twigs and branches to make them fit into bags more easily to be taken to the dump becomes more difficult with fully grown leaves. I got the job done right before the leaves start growing in earnest.
My hedge trimmer and the cord
This is what I crushed the branches with. It works well with the larger ones. The small ones get stuck easily.
It took me several hours to finish the job. I felt stiff and my muscles were aching in the evening. As I was chatting with a neighbor over (or rather through) the fence, she laughed when I quipped trimming and picking up the branches and twigs from the ground was like gymnastics with a purpose.
Three bags full of crushed hedge trimmings
This is what the dump looks like. Today was a cold and rainy day with a daily maximum temperature of 7 C. The whole week will be like this. It's going to get warmer only on the weekend.
I had a new garden tap installed because I let the old one accidentally freeze by forgetting to close it and take the hose off while only the spray nozzle was turned off when it was freezing for the first time in the fall. Thank goodness it did not break and no water leaked into the wall. My insurance company had it inspected and the moisture level of the floor close to the garden tap inside the mechanical room measured. No leak was detected. The problem is that the heat exchanger is adjacent to the garden tap and if there had been a leak, it would've been necessary to disconnect and temporarily remove the heat exchanger to have access to the wall to fix it. The total cost of that might have exceeded €10,000. I have such good insurance that it would've been covered for the most part. But it would still have cost me thousands. The insurance company and I agreed that it was best to replace the garden tap.