Lattice calculations of hadronic observables are aggravated by short-distance fluctuations. The gradient flow, which can be viewed as a particular realisation of the coarse-graining step of momentum space RG transformations, proves a powerful tool for evolving the lattice gauge field to successively longer length scales for any initial coupling. Already at small flow times we find the signal-to-noise ratio of two- and three-point functions significantly enhanced and the projection onto the ground state largely improved, while the effect on the hadronic observables considered here to be negligible. A further benefit is that far fewer conjugate gradient iterations are needed for the Wilson-Dirac inverter to converge. Additionally, we find the renormalisation constants of quark bilinears to be significantly closer to unity.