Maintaining gardens

 
 

We do tend gardens, on both an occasional basis or regularly scheduled throughout the season. We are always honored to be asked to do this work but we must beg your pardon if we cannot always accept new work.

For regular maintenance and special-skill occasional work, we are the gardeners, not simply the supervisors or providers of garden help, so our availability for garden and landscape maintenance is limited by hours-in-a-day. In addition, we have become involved with many gardens over 25 years and have been doing regular seasonal, monthly and bi-weekly maintenance at various of those sites as long. We have a few openings each year, when we are no longer needed on some of those gardens, and as those occur we can accept additional work of this type.

Sometimes we are trainers in a garden. In such cases we work as consultants to you and your gardeners.

For instance, it can be difficult to learn how to prune a climbing rose and have the confidence to clip hard enough to promote great form and bloom. (Look below, to see how much of a climbing rose disappears in 15 minutes' clipping.). So we have worked on an occasional basis in some gardens to prune roses side by side with the gardener at their home.

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From major overhauls to fine details such as deadheading balloon flowers (below), we love every aspect of gardening and are glad to help you.

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Our labor rate for garden care is $50 per hour per person on the job, plus necessary materials such as fertilizer and mulch. Except as specified otherwise on an estimate, planting and maintenance charges begin when we arrive on the site and end when we leave.

In general, garden care costs between $150 and $350 per 100 square feet of bed per year, and varies with a garden's starting condition, make up and its owner's aesthetic preferences. We must do an initial consultation to prepare a projection of maintenance costs for a specific project. On-site consultation is billed at $100 per hour, with a two-hour minimum. In some cases we can complete that consultation and estimate in conjunction with maintenance work we may have arranged to do for you.

 

Call us (248-681-7850) or email to discuss our maintenance services.