Forum

How do designers decide which plants to use ?

Excuse me while I leap onto my hobby horse....why do designers not give more thought to where their clients can source their plants from ?We seem to have a regular flow of customers who arrive on our nursery triumphantly clutching a garden design, fo

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The Lawn maintenance thread

One of the biggest assets of any garden, apart from the plants, has to be the lawn. It is usually the single largest part of any garden yet it is often overlooked or just ignored by home-owners and to a great extent professionals who just do not have

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Do you have a cancellation clause?

Hi All,

Hope your all enjoying the good weather.

Im just tidying up my T&Cs and noticed i didnt have a cancellation clause. I would be interested to know if/how you others deal with cancellations?

Thanks

David

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Make hay while the sun shines

I have not posted much in the last day or two but I have read every post and it is great to see such continued activity. I do not want to mention the other site but save to say, for 1900 (?) users, there is a tiny percentage who are posting but the a

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Philosophy, Plants and Life

Firstly, would anyone know of a book which deals with the theme of my thread.I have always been absolutely fascinated by nature, to the point that it's design is remarkable and exact, so much so, it has to be design, hasn't it?Yesterday, I eventually

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Landscaping, Garden Maintenance and Design Jobs Wanted

If you are looking for a gardening, landscaping or garden design job then add your details here. Please do not add any other information i.e. replies - contact the job offerer directly via the message facility. Please read 'finding good staff' for ot

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Landscaping, Garden Maintenance and Design Jobs Offered

If you have a vacancy that you are looking to fill then why not add the details here. Please keep the post to the job description, salary (if you want to included this) and location of the job with any relevant details specific to the employment. Ple

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Finding Good Staff

Just wondering how you all find staff. We are down to my husband and 2 guys at the moment as our senior guy has just announced he is leaving tomorrow!!! aghhh. Oh well, maybe life wants us to slow down a bit....but I was thinking of advertising again

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What memories to you have of your childhood garden?

I love nostalgia and often recall memories of growing up.

I wrote a rather self indulgent post some while back called - Memories of my childhood garden - on Landscape Juice.

Do you have any particularly strong memories of growing up and how returni

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Do you need to pay for good business advice?

Out of our trade members, how many of you are members of the APL or BALI? What is your view on membership of these trade organisations and do you feel it is justified to charge a fee to allow you in? What is more, do trade organisation just tend to c

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Fixed quotes?

Hi All.

I always tended to try and offer the client a fixed price quote so they could budget ok.

However, i keep overrunning and incurring extra costs which im currently absorbing, but im wondering whether i need to actually offer fixed price jobs.

For

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A question for the Garden Design group

I am keen to get the groups going a bit more (although I do not wish to thwart the great activity on the forums either). I asked a question in the garden design group a while back and I wonder what your thoughts are? https://landscapejuice.ning.com/gr

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Accepting electronic payments for garden maintenance

Related to the discussion about charging, I thought I would mention the idea of electronic payments for regular gardening and share some of my experiences.

Until this year, I have almost always insisted on payment by cheque from my clients - it seem

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Gardening chargeout rates and mindset management

You are all adding some great stuff and I can tell you that the feed back from members about the site, and members on other members, is so positive and I am delighted it is going so well. I would like to draw attention to this post from Phil Luscombe

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Forum thread changes

I have tweaked the forum categories and added a few extra. The main changes are the addition of a Garden Design thread and the splitting of the general thread into Landscaping and Gardening. I have also added a Machinery thread and a thread for Garde

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Site updates and strange goings on!

You might have noticed that occasionally, things do not reappear where you last left them and it may take a little bit of time to find it.

The reason this can happen is when Ning update their software that drives the engine room of this network and

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Small business advice - free downloads

I hope that you are find the resources here of great use. I intend to add to these resources over time as when I find the right one to promote. I do not have all the answers to the potential problems that your business my encounter, either as a start

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Garden design software - what does it do and what does it cost?

There are a number of garden software packages out there on the web. We have two members, Neil Bromhall - Complete Gardens and Tamsin Slatter who both provide different software packages.

I will let both Tamsin and Neil explain the benefits and adva

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What to do off-season?

Working in the garden maintenance side of horticulture, concentrating on domestic gardens, I have quite a lengthy off-season from about mid-December to about mid/late-February. I often only have bitty jobs from late November onwards as much of the wi

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Get shot of under performing contracts

Let us assume that you have five separate contracts each week and that four of them are accurate when it comes to the charge out rate.

The fifth one however only covers one fifth (20%) of your yearly cost (assuming it is a day a week for the year).

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Try this simple hourly rate test

Establishing what is the right rate to charge yourself out at is the tricky bit and nobody will get it 100% correct -but how do you know where to start?

Below is an example of how a one man band should approach setting a charge out rate.

My first con

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Treating your travel as a cost of landscape sales

Imagine quoting for two separate jobs? One job is located just 2 miles from your operating base and the other job is located 30 miles away.

For the sake of this exercise, let's say that both landscaping projects are exactly the same specification.

H

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It is never too early to seek advice

This is probably the hardest time for garden companies since the early 90's when a bleak recession gripped the United Kingdom. Many businesses ceased trading as work dried up and competition cut margins to negative figures. We are now very close to e

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Your Landscape Juice page

First, give some credit where credit is due. Richard Loader has kindly donated one of his images as the background to the Landscape Juice header - Thank you Richard. Now we do not have a global image that covers everyone so you can now completely per

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What is the legal status of a verbal contract?

I'm looking for advice on how you would all deal with this situation.I had looked after all of the maintenance needs of a small hilltop estate in Ayrshire for a Lady for 2 years. She was extremely satisfied with everything we did, how we went about d

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Garden Budgets

Just wondering what of budgets you have for your gardens? We generally do work over £15,000 (though we do the odd front garden for less here and there). Current garden is £32,000, last one was £28,000, one before, a front garden, was £6500, then ther

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