(collapses into chair)

[mme_hardy]

 My old gardener was extremely simpático but his workers did a terrible job (heading trees, killing flowers, and so on.)  I let him go this winter.  At the end of rainy season, I started looking to hire a new gardener, together with everybody else in Northern California.

In the last two weeks I had three gardeners ghost on me.  Came, surveyed the garden, promised to give me a quote, then were never heard from again.  I also interviewed three arborists.  One of them, a fruit-tree specialist, did the fruit trees.  The other two, thank Heavens, did show up and give binding estimates.   I'm planning on going with the second one, after double-checking scope with husband.  I may leave one inconvenient leaning oak tree until fall.  

I now have a gardener who's going to do the wildly overdue cleanup as well as monthly maintenance.  If he's a plant-killer too, I'll start all over on the monthly maintenance.

Still to do: find somebody to inspect and fix the sprinkler system.   However, today is a day of rest, dammit.   

My old gardener did all the above: spring cleanup, hedge trimming, tree pruning, and sprinkler maintenance.  I have to keep reminding myself that I wasn't happy with the way he did most of these, and that having to have multiple specialists may be more expensive, but gets the job done.  Sigh.

Comments

[movingfinger]

I'm frustrated too by the large number of mow-and-blow services that call themselves gardeners, mainly because the basic, basic additional things I would like done are not difficult and the guys do not seem to want to learn which plants are desirable and which are not. (E.g., weed strategy: dump mulch, hide problem.) And the pruning---agh, everything is a cone or a sphere, and forget about thinning. They either aren't equipped for or inclined to maintenance jobs like deadheading and candling, which can require a ladder and go pretty quickly if you have two or three people on one small tree or shrub.

Sigh. In your area, I'm pretty sure there's a strong cost-of-living effect; a real gardener has to upgrade to landscaping, and mow-and-blow guys have to inflate their prices and titles to stay in work. And the best work is probably in office parks, because it's routine and unfussy.

[mme_hardy]

The fruit-tree specialist took a long time, but I was sitting next to him asking questions (because I like learning things) the whole time, and after he was done there was light between the branches and no rubbing limbs. The trees will grow back a LOT healthier.