Do you pay a gardener or do your own lndscape maintenance?
 

The lawn mowing thread has me wondering. We used to do our own yard work. Now I have a gardener. I am not sure I can ever go back to doing the yard work myself before retirement. Time is precious on weekends and it is so nice not to worry about half a day of yard work and go play instead.

What's your arrangement?

George

When I lived at the beach I always did mine, just more time to look at women. Now I live in a compound and it is part of the system.

Do it myself. But we have so little grass, there is hardly any mowing. And the grass grows fast only for about 2 months in spring; in summer it turns brown, in fall/winter it is merely soggy. So I'm only mowing regularly for a few months of the year.

Lots of plants, I enjoy taking care of them and most are pretty low maintenance. The hand watering is a pain on hot days, but an automatic sprinkler system is in the plans to deal with that.

That just leaves the grassy/weedy sidewalk strips, and I could care less about those. Someday I will have someone tear out the grass strips and put in low maintenance ground cover stuff. Until then, my neighbors will have to keep averting their eyes. Sometimes my neighbor even mows my weedy strip for me, I feel a little guilty but I do stuff for him too.

Oh, I forgot, in the fall the leaves really pile up and that is a pain. By the time the city comes with a front loader and dump truck to do our street, I have accumulated a pile 2 feet high and 10 feet long, along the curb. If the rains come before the city does, it is a soggy mess on our streets, and dangerous driving too. But a service wouldn't help much with that.

When I was younger, we did all our own lawn and garden maintenance. Part of it was the tools! I had a nice California Trimmer (reel mower), a heavy duty edger, and a pro quality trimmer. I was responsible for the lawn, my wife and I shared the planting, pruning, and weeding, although wife did most of that. It took me about two hours once a week to have things looking great.
As a result of aging, back problems, arthritis, knee replacement and stuff like that, I began to spread the job out over two days, then three. I was about to go to four days a week when I realized I could hire it out (slow learner). Now it is done satisfactorily in 20 minutes with no effort or pain on my part.

Next step was to build a dozen 6'x1'x1.5' raised beds, fill them with very nice topsoil and compost, and plant them with minimum effort and bending. This worked so well that I built four more, then had a large deck built ( also about 1' off the ground) and furnished it with about two dozen large containers. Same deal, good soil, no major bending or effort.

Everybody is happy!

Best,
Tom

I do my own out of equal measures of cheapness and of immigration. Mostly cheapness, but when we did have a gardener for about 3 months, 5 years ago the only guy that spoke english was the one who came for the checks. I have a crappy looking lawn, but I'm not a part of the problem.

I do my own what little grass we have gets cut short go brown during summer. I keep the bushes trimmed nice and just rotate from front yard to back every other week maybe an hour or two.

At $250/visit, you quickly learn to mow your own grass.

+1

My son helps me when we do it. It usually takes about two hours with his help. Without I can do it in about 1. :D

Our lot is fairly low maintenance... mostly rocks a few palms and a tiny patch of grass. Unfortunately we have a monster mequite tree in our back yard. This thing grows amazingly fast and there's nothing I can do to maintain it. When it needs to be trimmed (about twice/year) it runs around $300-400. It takes 4-5 landscapers 3-4 hours to cut it back and they leave with the landscape trailer overflowing. I've thought about having the tree removed, but it shades our back yard from the sun all morning and shades our neighbors back patio and kitchen from the afternoon sun.

I do everything, including heavy landscaping (rockery, installing water features, shallow graves for my victims....wait, scratch that last one....), but I don't do tree cutting. Small stuff, sure, but the whole 'up on ladder with the chain saw' thing is just not my idea of fun.

We farm it out. Our time is worth far more, plus the allergies can be a real beotch.

Myself. To me its not work or wasted time, its the ultimate zen experience. Connecting with the rhythm of Nature.

No I have not smoked a big one. :D

I refuse to pay people to do things I am perfectly capable of doing.

My son and I tag team the lawn, I mow the back yard and he takes over the mower for the front yard. We have it down to a science, if we do it this way I finish with the trimmer / edging / blowing minutes after he finishes with the mower. We normally have it done in about an hour.

My wife and I take care of the pool together as well. That takes minutes a week.

I also do all the maintenance on all my cars. My son helps me here and more importantly he is learning how to work on cars so this is a win win.

My time is important to me as well but I just cannot see paying people to do these things, they really do not take that much time.

Totally agree. Especially cutting your own lawn. No offense to anyone, but I just feel a man should maintain his own property (as long as he is physically able to.)
To me, it is also a sense of pride. Id rather have the worst lawn on the block, and still be able to look at it and say "hey it might not be pretty, but I did it myself.
But, I'm like that with everything.

Like I have always said.. " Letting another man touch your lawn or car, is like letting him touch your woman!" :D

I have someone that mows. I don't have someone to do the other landscaping stuff. I can find cheap labor here, but not necessarily good labor.

When my parents lived in Spain, they had good, cheap labor. They had a guy who came to the house every 2 weeks and would mow and landscape. I think it cost them $8 every time he came to the house. The only time they had to pay extra was when he planted new plants.

Yup. And the few times I have hired anyone to do anything, I end up supervising some lazy assclown that does the job in 2x the time it would take me.

I do it all, unfortunately. Someday I'll wise up and buy a house that already has a nice yard. Mine was a mess when we purchased the place, two years later it's improved but still needs help. The highlight of the year was cutting down three large dead pine trees, the tallest was probably 40 ft tall. After a lot of work I've managed to get my front yard looking pretty good, but the back may need to be killed and re-sodded. Not to mention we want to re-landscape all of the planters, and bring in a lot of dirt to solve some drainage issues. Fun, fun, fun.

You must have a rather large area, or prices in AZ are not the same as in NJ.

For a 1/3 acre lot, the landscaping company charges $37.00 a cut, and $15.00 a month additional for grass removal. Up until this month, I've been cutting my own lawn. Typically took 4-5 hours if I did it right, even when using my Snapper rider mower.

So far, so good with getting a service to do it - my wife and I are very pleased.

-Z-man.

I'm too cheap to pay someone to do it. I can find better uses for the $100 or more per month it would cost to keep our yard looking good.

For me, the cost factor came down to this:
1. It's 4-5 hours a week for me to cut the lawn. That's roughly 20 hours a month.
2. It costs me $163 a month to have someone else cut the lawn for me.

I'd rather spend that 20 hours a month with my wife doing something more enjoyable than cutting the grass.
-Z

Newlywed?;):D