Hello all,
Thanks in advance as always for taking the time to provide your thoughts. Hope you're all surviving this lovely weather.
I'm about the enter my second season self employed. I do mainly weeding, mowing, pruning, general tidying, some planting.
I get asked a lot about lawn care. I wouldn't be touching the larger lawns I do, but was thinking of basically using a rake to scarify,then on the helpful advice of Jonny from Green Spaces I would overseed, fertilise and top dress on some of the smaller moss/thatch/weedy lawns.
My questions/concerns are this:
- I know this looks awful at first, do lawns generally recover well?
- I don't like to do things I have no experience of and charge so would it make sense to just charge for materials and offer time for free on a few regular clients until I see I haven't ruined their lawns forever?
- Is it crazy to attempt this with a rake, if doing it is a proper scrarifer the way to go?
- And finally is this actually worth it in terms of making profit. I do a fair bit of lawn mowing only clients so thought it could be a nice extra.
thank you! :)
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Replies
Yes it's crazy to consider using a rake only, both on time taken and results achieved. It's also a very bad idea to not charge for your time, as scarifying, aerating, top dressing are all time heavy.
As for profits, it's far more profitable than selling yourself per hour gardening. Lawn care is almost universally quoted per job/service rather than per hour.
Yes lawns recover very well, just patience is needed along with kind weather. Autumn scarifies are less stressful in this respect, and you can't be caught out by strnage spring weather.
It's a very good extra, but get some training and your spraying licence.
Great thanks Andrew, food for thought here.