How to clean up an overgrown garden.

Decide what stays before anything goes. Mark the plants, pavers and edging you want to keep with string or bright tape, so they don’t disappear under a trimmer.

Then clear a path and pull out the rubbish: old pots, timber, sheets of iron, toys and anything sharp. Lift it with a rake or shovel rather than your hands. The state’s snake fact sheet lists rubbish, wood piles and sheets of iron as places snakes take cover.

Sort as you go into general rubbish, recycling and garden waste. Give the garden waste its own spot near the gate or driveway, because in an overgrown garden that pile gets big fast.

Take tall grass and weeds down to about ankle height first. You’ll see the ground again, spot anything you missed, and be able to reach the roots. A line trimmer or brushcutter is quickest on big areas. Hand shears are safer near plants you’re keeping.

Cut from the top down, and take seed heads off before they drop. Bag them rather than leaving them on the ground.

Mind the time, too. Under EPA Victoria’s residential noise rules, mowers, other grass-cutting tools, chainsaws and electric power tools can’t be used before 7 am or after 8 pm on weekdays. On weekends and public holidays, the limits are before 9 am and after 8 pm.

Weeds come back when their roots, bulbs or runners stay in the ground. Pull or dig them out whole, ideally after rain: Gardening Australia notes that moist soil makes weeds easier to remove. It groups the common ones like this:

• Tap-rooted weeds such as dandelion, flatweed and capeweed lift out with a forked hand weeder, which gardeners call a daisy grubber.
• Bulb weeds such as oxalis and onion grass need digging out with the soil around them. Gardening Australia suggests drowning them in a bucket of water for 8 to 12 weeks.
• Running grasses such as couch and kikuyu need every bit of root removed, so follow each runner out.

Watch for restricted weeds. Agriculture Victoria lists Chilean needle grass as a declared noxious weed, restricted in every Victorian catchment. Its sharp-pointed seeds catch on clothing, animals and machinery, and the City of Whittlesea lists slashing, especially in peak flowering season, as one way it spreads. So don’t slash or mow it while it’s flowering or seeding, and check with your council before you tackle it. Our guide to common weeds in Melbourne shows how to tell the usual suspects apart.

With the weeds gone, you can see the plants properly. Start with anything dead, broken or rubbing, then shape what’s left. Step back often and check the shape from the house.

If you’re not sure how a plant copes with a hard cut, prune lightly now and look it up before you go further. Hedges have their own timing: see when to trim hedges in Melbourne.

Councils generally take leaves, grass, prunings, small branches and weeds in the green-lid food and garden bin. The limits differ, though. Moonee Valley doesn’t take large branches or tree stumps and sets an 8 cm maximum branch diameter. Hume takes small branches up to 10 cm thick. Neither takes soil or plastic bags, and rocks and treated timber are generally out too, so put garden waste in loose.

When the bin isn’t enough:

• Spread it out over a few collections if it can wait.
• Book a council collection. Hume and Whittlesea both run bundled branch collections; tie the bundles with string or twine.
• Have it taken away. Our green waste removal service loads it and takes it away, on its own or as part of a cleanup.

Never dump it. EPA Victoria says dumping waste on land that isn’t licensed to accept it is illegal, and garden waste and soil are among the waste types it takes reports on. Our green bin guide compares the rules council by council.