A thirty-foot hedge gets trimmed with a handheld trimmer and a ladder. The problem starts with a three-hundred-foot hedge, six feet tall, running along the boundary of an apartment complex or a commercial property: trimming is only half the job, the other half is collecting and hauling away the debris, and a ladder is no longer enough.
Three ways to cut
A portable hedge trimmer, gas-powered or battery-powered, is still the right tool for low hedges and finish work: no machine handles curves and corners like an operator with the bar in hand. For long, straight hedges there is the hedge-cutting bar mounted on a boom, on a tractor, or on a skid steer: it cuts an entire side in one pass, straight, without fatigue. For tall hedges, beyond the reach of the boom, cutting is done from an aerial platform: the operator stands in the basket, works at the right height, and moves along the hedge without climbing down.
The work nobody puts in the quote
After trimming, branches and leaves cover the full length of the hedge on the ground. In a condo yard you can't pull up with a truck: you come through the pedestrian gate, down the walkway, between parked cars. Anyone who has done this job with a wheelbarrow knows how many back-and-forth trips it takes. A compact tracked machine makes the difference here: a tracked dumper with an agricultural bed, low and wide, that collects the light material, fits through any gap a person can walk through, and hauls it to the loading point in a few trips.
Tall hedges and the basket
For cypress or laurel hedges that have grown past ten feet, a ladder is the slowest and most dangerous option. A tracked aerial platform — the kind that fits through a three-foot gate — pulls up next to the hedge without damaging the lawn, stabilizes on uneven ground, and lets you work along the full length by moving at ground level. The basket carries the operator and the tool; trimming is still done by hand, but at the right height and with both hands free.
In the Cormidi lineup, the tracked aerial platforms are designed exactly for this type of access; for debris on the ground there are the tracked dumpers with agricultural bed, and where one machine needs to handle everything, the CMF multi-purpose machines with grab and bucket.
How to organize a long hedge job
Trim a section, collect, haul away, move to the next section: whoever trims everything first and then collects everything afterward covers the same ground twice. The hauling machine should be chosen based on the narrowest gap it has to pass through, not on payload: a hedge produces volume, not weight. And for tall hedges, the platform has to be sized against the actual ground where it will be used, not the catalog spec. The dealer can verify that on site.
