Business / personal name
Jan's Gardening
County
Essex
Primary telephone number:
07867783391
About you and your business ( please complete)
Jan's Gardening is a husband & wife team. We are both self taught gardeners although Jan is by far the more experienced and knowledgeable. Jan has been gardening since we married in 1986 and has also worked in a plant nursery. Jan began gardening for friends and friends of friends through word of mouth recommendations and Jan's Gardening was born, all very informal though. Paul was made redundant in December 2008 and after six months fruitless job hunting we decided to set up Jan's Gardening as a business. Our first job together was in July 2008 and we have gone from strength to strength, building up our knowledge and services that we now offer. We have lovely customers who we regularly visit for ongoing garden maintenance and have had many satisfied clients from one off jobs.
Business category
Domestic
Where did you hear about Landscape Juice
Google'd info for hedge trimming.
Comments
I began gardening in the early eighties but gave it up - couldn't make it pay.
Our two favourite jobs are year round contracts at residential estates - in both places the people seem mostly retired and I think they find us, as a couple, more approachable than your regular beefy 'landscape contractors' - we've got to know all the different characters and their stories - we have fun being there and there's always tons to do - big gardens - and our 'message' is much the same as yours.
Phil's right about pricing, we've done a lot of running around in the past, for not much profit - now we will charge up to £40ph - but saying 30 or 40 sounds a lot when spoken - even though its only half that per man of course .... so we prefer to give a price for our day or half day, some agree - some don't. Both of the contracts only pay about £25 - but we like the security of the year round work. The management put out a tender each year so there's not much we can do except normal 8% increase each april - maybe thats why one of them was really in quite a bad state when we started .... which made us wonder how do people get these positions in the first place. --- These two jobs and my first one (first one for a long time) - a four acre place - a good place for Karen to start learning - we were introduced to by friends.. We haven't thought about our own web-site - the two estate jobs aren't guaranteed so I think maybe we should!
We've spent ages trying to carefully select petrol tools that can best help us do the job - all except for a shredder - we've ended up with an electric Bosch 25TC - it's ok, but I do wish I'd gone with the petrol Makita. We compost most of our so called waste (but not conifers) in a 20' long wood bin divided into four, down on our allotment. We grow herbaceous perennials here alongside the vegetables - we love it down there, and I just had my first win on e-bay - a potato fork!
Sorry, are you still there? Platform hedge ladders I wouldn't be without - I have a Hedgemaster but there's also the Henchman. The other thing that we've just managed to afford and has been a godsend is an automatic (for Karen) Sprinter van - so good to be able to stand up and move around in something after the old volvo estate.
I'm sure you both will learn a lot from the amazing accumulated knowledge on LJ, - Karen doesn't take part but she likes to read it all and keep up to date. Stick up for yourselves (and eachother) - Pete.