DN22 Gardening

AS the title suggests, i'm fed up with Rob, wished i'd never heard of Alaskan bloody mills. Bought a 30" mill, plus mini mill, chain for the 880 ( not cheap, but worth the cash). All good Had a play with some small bits of Ash, good results, nice timber, gave it to a neighbour who makes a bit of furniture. Bought the grinder to make my teeth all straight and level Went to do a large ish piece of Aspen we've had for a while, and the bloody things not big enough !!!!!!! Now i've got to get in the wifes good books to get the purse strings open for a set of 36" rails, a bar, and yet another chain.....:sneaky2: Why did i ever think i may be able to make a couple of quid milling ???? Only joking, I'd recommend both Rob and the Alaskan to anyone. Never milled before, so if i can get reasonable results within 1/2 a day anyone can Pics to follow

Pablo the "Spanish Expert" certainly gets my vote for ponytail of the year. Spikes !!!!! WTF for ? As said above, just knock out the smaller one its hung up on !!!! Health and Safety blokes must have been laughing themselves silly

we don't use it on the smaller saws, just the 880 and the big husky we've got, Can't see it being much good on the 200T's

they're against the "dash for gas" or in proper speak, the fact that the power generating co.s are building so many gas fired power stations, thereby pushing the price of domestic gas up !!! The same people will be the first ones moaning when the lights go out

Hi all, I think chainsaw sharpening may be on the way out. The reason........ The 12v sharpener that Robs selling for £50 Its just too easy, theres no fun winding the groundie up any more when he's sharpened the saw and it cuts worse than before he mutilated it... After 10 mins play today, we'd got it up and running to my liking. It took all of another 10 mins to sharpen a totally mullered chain off the 36" husky !!!!! We were ringing up a quite naily Horse chestnut butt, so the sharpener got quite a good workout. Can highly recommend these to anyone, a good £50 spent

Don't know if its been on the national news or not but some protesters have invaded one of our local power stations, West Burton They're camped out on the middle chimney. there's been loads of police activity in the area, bikes, cars, choppers etc. Sat in the truck having a bite to eat today and every time one of them drove past us they were giving us the eye. I thought it'd be funny to wander down the road a bit and play with a climbing kit. it wasn't long before a bike went past, turned round and pulled up and asked me "what the F$^K i thought i was doing" all innocent i looked up and asked him the way to the power station main gate Well I thought it was funny. The same officer drove past us an hour or so later when i was dangling from the same kit, 30' up, over the road, roping some willow limbs down. I did give him a big wave

put your foot on it. just be careful

all of the above plus, we then offer our regular customers monthly tidy ups, inc. leaf collecting, snow shifting etc. about 50% of our customers will take this up you're not making a fortune, just paying the wages, saves having to lay staff off over the winter

£120 ish here too and i am a gardener, and a tree surgeon, and a landscaper, a father, and a....o you get the idea

We do the same on certain jobs, though not for immediate sale...

bloody hell, at £7/£9 a mtr i'm definitely getting back into the swing

learnt it in the 80's first job in the woods, as said above, once you've done a few miles it gets VERY boring. haven't done any for a few years, i'll have to get the old bill hook out and have a play

if its a new customer, we always deliver in the crates then tip the crates out. We never cease to be amazed by peoples reaction to how many logs they actually get

i'm with Genset steve on this. We use old onion crates which measure 1.2 x 1 x 1 mts = 1.2 cu We explain to customers the math, they can even choose their crate if they so choose. The sides don't stretch, so the loads the same size every time. We also do the "introduce a customer and you get some free kindling" Works well, we also do a free bag of kindling if you order a tipper load (2.4 cube, or two crates) Its all about giving a little bit

hi Rob, We're near you buddy, based near retford, notts. currently the subby climber we use is looking at a three week lead time on all enquiries !! if you do find a decent one, and he's got some time spare, pass his number on please. thanks, dave

we've given up trying to educate people and started selling in dumpy bags. we've even had customers saying they get more logs in a bag than one of our 1.2mcu crates !!!!!

do they have any more ? been looking for these, i'd be quite happy printing the lot of them off

Sorry to all you firewood guys but i think i'm the enemy.. We're primarily tree surgeons, so get all our wood for free.......... apart from the discount required by most customers now to take the logs away, inflated transport costs due to only having transits to run back and forth to the yard with a ton of logs on the back, inflated processing costs due to irregular sized rings, longer processing time due to having to split everything by hand....etc Up until this year we only sold arb waste, (approx 150 cu a year ) Our policy was that we sold quality logs at a premium, last year s/wood were £60 a cu, h/wood was £75, ash was £80. We sold out every year. However, we moved yards at the begining of the year so sold all the rings off cheaply to avoid moving them. This means that we have very few saleable logs this year, (despite the above comment that tree surgeons logs will be green, we don't sell unseasoned unless the customer wants it!!). This year s/wood is £75, h/wood is £85, ash is £90. We have a reputation for selling good logs, this has been hard earned, but we're reaping the rewards now, and as we've a limited supply, i was only going to supply existing customers. However, i've found a local wood owner who struggles to sell his logs ( charges £50 for a bag of seasoned h/wood) so i've just bought 200 cu of him, all split before April this year, and because i've bought so much he's doing them for £45 a cu, which is even better value when you take into consideration the fact his bags will only have been around 0.8 of a cu. I've said it before, and it's still my belief, I really don't know how you dedicated firewood guys do it....or why. You must be working your nads off just to earn a wage, never mind grow your business... I also agree that subsidies are skewing the economy and keeping prices artificially low. ( but maybe thats just jealousy talking )

Out with a few of my mates a few years ago (well 20 odd years ago) and we were celebrating the birth of one of my god children, one of the lads who was out with us was a complete D$ck. He was winding the father of said baby up non stop, all night. It eventually kicked off and i was that angry that i turned round an punched the nearest thing to me... Turned out to be a 25' x 8' plate glass window of a well known building society. Don't know if it was weak, or i'd hit it at exactly the right point, but the next thing i know is there's an almighty crash, and the windows in 30,000 pieces on the floor and theres more alarms ringing, police rushing, etc Off i scooted at a rapid rate of knots to the nearest pub to 'blend in' Next thing, there's two policemen coming in one door of the pub, and two in the other, turns out they'd followed the blood trail from my cut hand !!!!! A friendly bouncer gave me a beer towel, and ushered me out of the back door. Ever since then i've managed to hold my temper in check....just

same here, once i got a smart phone and was able to do emails on site, my time spent doing evening work (quotes, invoices, RA's etc) dropped dramatically. still have to do the obligatory evening site visits, but thats the nature of the job. can't see how i could integrate a quote into an invoice as there's so much more info on one of our quotes than i'd like to put on an invoice. an app to convert some sort of note taking app's info into a quote would be good. good luck on the assignment, dave

We started off doing only tree work but diversified into grass cutting, and eventually gardening, and landscaping. Alot of tree people look down on mere 'Gardeners' like something they've stood in. We set our first RHS qualified gardener on 2 years ago and she makes us more profit during the summer than our climbers do !! To listen to her talk to another knowledgeable gardener is like listening to another language. She also works harder that most of my lads. One of my groundies was with her for a full week on a makeover job, and by friday was complaining of blisters and a bad back Don't confuse pushing a mower round a lawn and the odd poke with a hoe for proper gardening. Be honest, and if you don't know something, admit it to the client. Honesty works wonders. As for pricing, you'll find your own level. We do both, hourly rate, and individual pricing. The trouble with hourly rate is that your income is fixed to the number of hours you work. Out of an 8 Hour day, we can only charge for around 6 hours. Traveling to and from jobs, lunch, loading the van in the morning, and unloading at night, all eat into your day. Whereas if you charge say £25 for a lawn thats going to take an hour, you've managed to get the client to pay for your travelling. And the more you mow, the faster you'll get and the same lawn might only take you half an hour once you get the feel of it. Hedge cutting pays better than mowing, but you need more kit, and a higher level of skill. For a hedge cut that'd take an hour i'd be looking at around the £70 area, depending on species. There's also the problem of getting rid of the arisings from your work. I've got to admit that it winds me up when i see paid gardeners tramping their cars and trailers into the local tip four or five times a week getting shot of their crap at tax payers expense, especially knowing how much it costs us to do the same But saying all of the above, i wish i'd gone it on my own 20 years ago when i'd have had the energy to do whats needed now. Go for it, you'll love it !!!

We've had our A530 for 5 years now, it almost broke us buying it, but its paid us back times over. Did a large site clearence at the back end of last year with a mate of mine (his job) He had a petrol tow along T/Wolf 6" and i thought it was significantly slower, the brash had to be cut up alot smaller (our Jensen was pulling 40' lengths of Lombardi through in a single gulp) I know they're totally different machines but its a VERY big difference. Its also, i'm ashamed to say, fairly addictive pulling big lumps of tree over with the jensen, or lowering half ton lumps out. Since buying it, the only time we've used the tirfor is for stump pulling. And, as long as HSE aren't listening, there might have been the odd time near the end of the shift when the Jensen comes in handy for pulling tired (old) climbers back up the larger trees

Just priced a conny reduction, conny hedge removal, stumps out, and fit the new fence. The chap lived accross the road from where we'd just done a similar job Client wanted the price broken down into its seperate pieces, no problem. Priced each one as if it were a separate job, and took a discount off at the end if he had the lot done. Got an email back saying the price for the tree work and stumps was fine, but the fencing was too expensive. He'd had a quote at nearly 15% cheaper. I explained why i'd arrived at the costs i had, and if he wanted us to do the tree work and the other contractor to do the fence, that was fine with us. No, he'd seen our work, the quality of finish and materials used was to his liking, its just that we were too expensive !!!! Sorry, but thats our price. Upshot is, the jobs booked in for 4 weeks time. Stick to your guns, make what you need to make, and have fun

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