ATC1983

Northern Ireland

Also what would be the best weed/grass killer for this type of area in terms of economy, effectiveness - and would these damage future regrowth?

Thanks for advice - think the client would prefer reseeding - how much seed would be needed per M2 - ie would you use a couple of handfuls per ft2 or what is the best way to do the seeding? I've seed distributors for seed - would these be good for even distribution, and is there an issue with putting down too much seed? Once reseeded, how long are you talking before the first weeds start coming back in?

Hi Looking for some help on a job which is requiring me to rotavate a fellow's garden. Essentially, the client's garden is utterly full of weeds and bushes - I've maintained this for him just by cutting it back once monthly. However despite applying selective weedkiller, and some seed, it just regrows as weeds without much grassy green. It comes up uneven, and this is compunded by the fact that the client, when he first bought his house, set fire to a huge amount of wood in the garden with a view to clearing a lot of the weeds out, so much of the ground is superficially scorched, to about and inch down. I've turned the soil in these parts and the soil underneath looks beautiful, and weeds are starting to grow through where he has scorched it. But these patches remain large in the garden, which is about 15M by 7M. He has taken advice from a landscaper whose idea was to rotavate the garden, however he simply can't afford the cost of this. I have offered to hire a rotavator for the day, assuming he pays the costs, and do it for experience, so I can later resell rotavation as part of my own portfolio and get a grip on the machinery, methods, costs, time etc to make a business model around it. We are discussing what the best way to approach this is at the moment. We were thinking either: 1) Manually weed the entire garden, once it regrows after a recent cut, clearing this out of the soil, then commence rotavation, even out soil, then reseed or lay lawn roll; or 2) Apply a large amount of weedkiller across the entire garden, kill as much of all growth as possible, then rotavate, evenly spread soil, then reseed or apply lawn roll. Can I ask how you guys with more experience would approach the problem?

Cheers - up for round 2 tomorrow, with two gardens to do. One at £30, just for hedging, which will be easy, and a mate's garden for £20 (he's on benefits), so at least something in the diary. Got talking to the neighbour of that garden today and have quoted him £26 / hour to clear his back - it is overgrown to 5 ft with bushes, thorns, and small trees. I'm charging £13 per labourer - so the cost per hour is for two labourers. This will be the most I've ever charged, and my prices are increasing and I feel more confident increasing them now I'm starting to know the job and all my tools. Went too cheap before out of fear of being exposed as an amateur, but there should be around 4-7 days in this next job, depending on who's helping me out, so it should be a good earner.

Used Ryobi brush cutter and extension shaft for hedges - need to get another extension shaft for later use to double it up - didn't quite get the top of the hedges - am absolutely wrecked after over 12 hours at it. [/img] [/img]

I've got a big job lined up on Thursday. I tried to price this job well and think I have done. My total takings for it will be £200, and I'm bringing another worker out with me to help me for the day. The job consists of two large rows of large hedging which needs cut back at the sides and top, requiring step ladders and hedge trimmers / extendable hedge trimmers. The garden is bigger than a tennis lawn, and consists of a huge amount of uncut grass, around 2 foot high. In order to do the grass, I was going to strim it - but was wondering should I get a brush cutter attachment for this instead? And could anyone give me an idiot's guide to the pros and cons of one and the other? I know if I start with strimming I'll lose a lot of wire - which I don't mind - but will lose a lot of time replacing wire, and fixing strimmer head when the wire gets stuck. This takes about 5-10 minutes a pop and I always run the risk of a spring popping out, possibly ruining the job. Another factor is the size of the hedges. If I remember right one row goes up to around 15ft - so I'm not sure if my 8 step step ladder and extension will be able to reach, and was going to get a set of extension ladders for this part. I'm using a Ryobi kit which extendable hedge trimmers, but I don't think it will reach far enough. Is it wise, in future, to buy a separate long reach for this type of job (I think my ryobi, in total, goes to about 1.5M in length)? Thanks in advance

Exactly, and in a free country nothing, not even the government, should be allowed to step in to create a false market by either minimum wage or by tax. What I hate is people criticising me for how I'm starting out when a) there are no other ways for me to start out and b) they started out exactly the same way. It reminds me of my CS30 course. The trainer told us all about how his dad in the 80s, when there was virtually no health and safety law / bureaucracy in employment law (compared to now) and built up his own firm, which the trainer would inherit when his dad died. When I asked him what's to stop me doing the exact same, he shot off on one about undercutting, no insurance, no practice etc just the fact I was just sugggesting I did exactly what his dad did before him. In other words, his principal reason for believing what he did was not because he could give a toss for the legislation - he told us all about h/s and all that, yet had photos all over his website of him breaking every h/s rule in the book (and for which he threatened to fail us in our cs30) - but because he had an entrenched and inherited interest in others taking his business. That's all it comes down to. The law only exists to protect people who have status.

Yeah, he's just coming along to help out. He's 64, so isn't as fit or as strong as me, and enjoys a break for a smoke and lager too frequently, but he has many years experience at this type of work. When I finished the last job, I was convinced I didn't have the experience to level out the rest of the garden and didn't want to undertake the work. However, when my father and I built up the small wheelchair ramp out of the mounds of earth dotted about I considered that it is simpler than it looks. It's a question of relicating this strategy on mass in the garden. My only concern is, having removed the excess soil, do I try to add sand or anything to ensure there is consistency and strength in the earth, and how do I tell or know if the soil will be strong enough to hold when I lay down the turf rolls over it? The money I'd give to him is just a thank you which I've factored into the cost - he helped me for a few hours on the last job and refused to take a penny - then, when driving by the offy, reconsidered when he knew he could get a crate of carlsberg and a packet of smokes out of the cash. As for undercutting, even the govt. supports undercutting. I mean it tolerates people taking on apprenticeships at £40 a week (never mind a day),and it routinely involves itself in the labour market in variant ways which are unfair to some companies and business models compared to others. I could go on all night with examples but won't. I'm just trying to learn a trade here to I don't have to work in a boring office with patronising women managers for the next 40 years.

Thanks for the encouragement. I got back to the guy today and asked him if he wanted me to go ahead and level his garden. I am doing it on the cheap, but I will try to make this my last work on the cheap, simply because I'm getting better at the job and am learning to price it. To be honest I think I lacked confidence in my ability, only being an amateur, so didn't want to barge in and say twenty quid an hour. I've offered him, to dig and level his garden, going downwards, labour at £7 / hour, plus circa £110 in costs. Costs are for petrol, chain sharpening, a sledgehammer, spare spares, tarpalin cover to hold in soil at back where he has a meshed fence, and other bits and bobs. This job is solely to level his garden which is about 5 by 5 metres. My father said there is a week of work in it, so I'm anticipating 3-7 days, which should earn £210-£490 in wages, and £4 an hour for my father when he helps. He quite literally, like Homer, works for beer money, and a bit for cigarettes. After this my idea would be to buy pre-fab lawn roll from B and Q at around £4 a roll - about 10 of them - and charge him £30 to put them down. This would mean for under £1000 I'd turned a garden with 7, 25ft trees, covered in weeds, ivy, nettles, brambles, without sunlight, or ability to move, into a respectable lawn, ready for the barbecue and socialising. I will take photos next time I'm on sign and try to get them uploaded here to give you guys an idea of the work I did. I know I'm amateur but the guy said today again he was delighted with the job and it would be a question of when and not if he would be in touch, namely when he gets the money together.

Pictures - brought my camera for the last day - but forgot to get triple a batteries in - would have liked to have got a photo up here to show the work I got in. The before and after would be unbelieveable - particularly considering I just started out. It was literally overgrown in every direction, ivy round the sides and back, weeds everywhere and brambles, bushes, thorns, you name it. Re chain sharpening - I really am useless at this. I tried it in the field with my file - but without a clamp or vice. I basically stuck the chain break on and held it between my legs and tried to get in 5/6 runs at each cutter, but it was still blunter than a plastic fork when I fired it up. I will need to do a bit more studying for this - I will still include a cost for this in future, but if I'm doing it in my own time, it still helps me justify a pricing cost to the customer. Re stump grinding. I was researching earlier the price of a grinder and note they're around 3.5K to buy, and £130 to lease per day. Is there any way to grind without one, or should a surgeon draw up a separate pricing structure for grinding a stump and a separate price for merely felling it and site clearance? If I left 7 stumps, at £130 a day to rent, I would need to be charging around £15 a stump I reckon to make good money ie £245, but this would seem prohibitely high for most customers.

Finished job today - 28 hours on site, and earnt £300. Not so bad for my first major job. Learnt a vast amount about my saw and how quickly it blunts - about every 2nd or 3rd tree, very quickly in other words. If I had to reprice I would have charged: £50 per tree at 7 trees, giving £350 £40 general gardening, giving £40 £30 costs, petrol, giving £30 £25 costs, to sharpen 2 semi-chisels, giving £25 £12 costs, weedkiller, giving £12 Total = £446 This would have been more satisfactory - but the customer was delighted, and told me I'd more than earnt it. I even fixed up his side fence, and built up enough soil connecting to his path beside his house so the wheelchair user can get into the garden. Result - one knackered and soaked labourer and one happy customer, and a massive injection of experience. My main taking from the job must be how to landscape properly - from working in other jobs I know all jobs are simple, but it just comes down to attention to detail and repetition to get good. I'll have to work out maybe three landscaping options then memorise and perfect these and resell them to the customer.

Thanks for the change in attitude guys - I know I've got to start charging more. I did another 8 hours today - 12 in total if you include 2 trips to the dealer, the first to sort my saw out; the second to have the chain resharpened, and buy 3 more semi chisels so I won't have to go out as often. I won't even disclose what I charged for this big tree and garden clearance job - but I've put in over 24 hours already and I can start to see how the costs are computed. From now on I'm charging £50 for a tree the size and spec of those I did. Had I done that here, with £40 for the gardening, and £40 for expenses, it would have been a much better result for me.

Let me say I'm trying my best to get into this with little prior experience. I have had 8 customers so far. In that time I've become much stronger at pricing a job and making estimates. Each customer I have had has praised me on the quality and cost of my workmanship. I was told I did a great job on a front and back garden for which I earnt £25 - it took me nearly two hours of work, but I was proud of it and prouder that the customer was happy and could finally let their kids and dog out. I did another job of removing 4 ferns and completely underestimated the pricing. Rather than be an asshole and demand more money half way through I stuck to the original bill as I thought it would be unfair on the customer - he then paid me double what I had asked (which I imagine was probably only a tenner short of the real market price). He also showed me where a "professional" tree surgeon had completed a similar job out his back - leaving a large, unmissable stump in the earth. My work completely removed almost 95% of the stump, with only a little bit visible, allowing the customer to regrass it. In the work I've done I have had two repeat customers, one recommendation, and will have made just under £500 since I started advertising one month ago, the majority of which has been made in the past 8 days. Bear in mind I also work full time, earning 19K a year as an accounts clerk, and you will understand something of my work ethic and my committment to getting the job done. Also bear in mind that 6/7 weeks ago I could barely turn a machine tool on, couldn't fix strimmer wire, didn't understand about different oil strokes, had no trailer, no customers, little understanding of equipment and the efficiency of each tool. I now have had my first business, repeat custom, 2 large jobs of tree work whose market value would be in the region of £500-600 (but for which I stupidly charged much less - but I will learn from this), a 5x3 trailer, 90% of equipment needed for this line of work, tools, overalls, and critically experience, both at doing the work and pricing the work. Criticising me for the rate I'm asking for my job, in my view, is unfair - it's unrealistic, as I explained to my customer, for me to go in and complete the later work and think I can do it to a great standard. However, he is only offering me because he was hugely impressed at the other work I had done. To quote him he was amazed that so much could be done by one guy in so short a period of time (1 day). My price, which I have yet to put to him, is in reflection that this work will be, more than anything, experience-generative, rather than cash-generative. He knows this and is happy with that. I started this thread to ask advice on how the best way is to approach this - not to get shot with a flame-thrower. You response demonstrates the moronic machoness that seems to exist in every manual trade. Let me give you another example. A friend employs, or did employ, a commercial gardener to do his garden, as he has done for years. This gardener (no education, not well spoken) turns up in people's gardens, does a 45 minute job strimming and raking, and charges £25 a time. He doesn't cut hedges for this price, and he doesn't mow after strimming. Now who do you think is the better businessman, him or me? Him because he gets more money per job, or me because I do a substantively better job and will eventually take his customer base off him when people realise they're being taken for a ride? Even if I did 6 good jobs at £25 per job, averaging 1 hour to 2 hours per job, I would make over £150 a day (150% higher than my per day wage in an office), with more for tree jobs. This isn't "undercutting" - it's hardwork, and it's the reason why the UK is full of foreigners - they understand it, where half our population would rather sit on their holes and watch Jeremy Kyle. You said something's mad on this forum - it is - namely that people with no experience but aspiration to run a business get flamed, and then get flamed again when trying to get good, having established the basics of the business.

See I can't get a digger in - there's no access save by the garage door - a crane would need to be hired to get over. Would bark really be that bad for one in a wheelchair? Is it easier to build up with soil or dig downwards to a set level and would the idea of wood markings work it out?

Hi all Looking for advice - I am in the process of clearing a back garden for a customer, which has involved clearing out around 7 trees, strimming, cutting hedging / ivy back, and finally applying weedkiller and dumping the lot. This has taken a lot longer than I expected, and have (see other thread) had a bit of bother with my saw, which has stopped me finishing off the tree trunks. The customer's garden is very very uneven, with build ups in one bit and declensions in other parts. Now that I've cleared out all the overgrowth, he has asked me if I could try to sort out the rest of the garden. However, I have no experience in levelling a garden and have told him this. He is however willing to pay me still to have a go at it and help me build up experience at this. My idea, ideally, would be to try to level the garden, then put down ar large amount of bark to cover the entire thing. It's further complicated by the fact that the customer shares his house with a disabled friend who is wheel chair bound and needs access to the garden, and, as the garden is already at a height, would need some type of slope built into it to accommodate his movements. Initially I didn't want to even try this, but thinking of it now, I am considering if I could essentially use a large number of stick markers throughout the garden and decide what level to take it to - I think reducing the volume of it would be best. To do this I wouldn't want to charge him a large amount of money - maybe £6.25 an hour I think would be fair owing to my inexperience, plus whatever costs I incur. This would be for a 12 hour day, for as many days as it takes me to complete. The garden is maybe 6.5M width by 5M length. Any ideas on feasibability of this job, or how to approach it?

Hi, my Husq gave up yesterday in the field and I couldn't repair it there and then, as I couldn't figure out what the problem was. Essentially, my chain just forze up and wouldn't give way or move at all. When I took it apart, and got a little bit of hand from a techie I know, we narrowed the problem down to the little wheel that attaches to the side of the chain break (on the side compartment you take off), which won't budge at all. Is there a quick way to fix this? I mean, he has recommended going to the dealers tomorrow as I'm still in warranty but I obviously want to know for future reference how I can thisup and going again. I know I could try forcing it but I'm afraid of invalidating the warranty.

Got it fixed - think my fuel ratio was too weak. Also got the damn line out which had stuck - another pain in the arse. Apart from that I used a mechanical lawn mower costing £39 which did the job superb and lawn shears. Took longer than expected but lessons learnt for future.

This is my problem - I've got a decent, big mower, but it's not conducive to doing small lawns round people's sides and backs. I don't intend to strim the grass - just to get overgrown gardens down to a manageable size, before mowing them. I was using the ryobi clip on strimmer, then changing to the mower once I'd cut an overgrown lawn down to size then done the sides growth. I think I really just have to use the strimmer now, and a mechanical cutter which won't be too bad - it's the same type of effort, as the attachment mower took a while to get up to speed anyway. Bringing the larger petrol mower onto jobs simply isn't efficient as although it's good it can't be manouevred round gates, and it's a nightmare to turn without lifting it up.

Yeah - it's been running fine every time before, it's like the engine was heating up and revving to its normal level then it just started revving like crazy. Going to get a mechanical mower - whenever I use the ryobi power head mower it takes a while, even when the power tool has been on for a good 15/20 minutes strimming, to get it up to full speed and cutting fast. It would be so much easier just to have got a cheap petrol strimmer and a mechanical mower, which has the added advantage of having a colllector also.

2 stroke - about 1/2 to 3/4 full.

Ok, so I've been getting a few jobs in and things have been going fine, except today I had to abandon a job half way through as when using my mower attachment my Ryobi engine started roaring like crazy, before spluttering and dying. Could this be overheating? Or could the air filer be jammed up? I initially tried doing the lady's garden with hand shears but it was taking too long - incredulously I'm going off to buy a mechanical mower and just finish the job in the old fashioned way. Even a small petrol mower would be better than this attachment lark.

Yip, totally. I think whether or not it can be made a go of depends on where you are in the country. Fortunately and unfortunately I live in Northern Ireland meaning properties are dirt cheap. A mostly modernised, but fully rentable house is 'selling' down the street from me at £29,000. It isn't budging - I expect it would go for £25,000. At 20% deposit, or 5K, the mortgage, rates and H insurance would be under £220 odds a month and I could get £350 min from the Housing Executive (in NI landlords can still get the rent paid to them unlike England). I know I could also try to rent house at £400 but £350 minimum would be on the cards, guaranteed money. I had a large amount of cash saved but I stupidly invested them in shares which let's just say have panned, so I need a different, more conservative investment approach. If my investment had paid off, I would never even dreamed of anything like going into gardening, and would have maybe 6/7 properties before I hit 29 - in September.

Ok points taken on board - but I have to stress as well this is something I wanted to take up part time with a view to perhaps going full time later on down the line. I am already working a full time job - boring office work - and would like to get out by at least 35. I am 28 - and between now and 35 I hope to buy maybe 5 or 6 properties as BTLs as a pension plan with my savings over the next few years, then have a decent enough customer base to know I could make between 10-15K every year doing landscaping and gardening jobs. This is my ambition, and I find it enjoyable, and that it saves on gym membership. Hopefully things will work out - did a little leafleting today, but still no more calls sadly. Was talking to a friend last night who paid his usual gardener £30 for maybe 30 minutes work - just to do a front and back lawn on a small semi - he didn't even touch the hedges! I know I can beat the likes of those guys at their own game as their work is crap for what they charge but it's all down to balance now between costs and getting work, so will see how it goes.

K thanks - I think, generally this is what I have done. I've blitzed the majority of weeds with the strimmer, and taken the weeds and grass right down, then applied that course. I think my principal fault then is not having waited to apply seed - hopefully it won't be slaughtered with the weed and feed - the instruction was basically not to apply when reseeding, but I was trying to avoid the main areas I was reseeding with it. I presume enough grass will start to come out anyway and make a show.