Lawn Care

The first two years I used a lawn care service, I was basically pleased with the service I received for the price.  This year, not so much.  The owner told me she had some new people and there was more of a learning curve than she expected.

It started off with my request to get the leaves raked.  It took 3 tries before they actually finished, leaving piles of leave on the east side of my house and under my pecan tree.  (There is actually some leaf detritus there.) I paid for 3 trips to my house to do this.  I guess that is probably okay, because if they had spent the time the first time doing this work, it would have taken them that much time. They mowed when they raked leaves, and I asked them not to mow the vinca, but they did, anyway.

Then I decided this year to get the yard scalped. It helps with weed control, but the down side is it pick up the clippings that I want to mulch into the ground. But I do not scalp every year. I asked that they not scalp the vinca in the northeast corner of the yard, because the neighbor's Bradford pear, and my grapevine on the clothesline create too much shade, and the grass does not grow there. But because they scalped the vinca, anyway, as it was not obvious to them where it was, after they had mowed it. The owner of the landscape service told me if I watered, she thought the vinca would come back, but offered to buy some for me. I went with the watering option, and the vinca has come back better and stronger than ever (this sometimes happens with plants.)

I bought some plastic pickets to mark off the vinca, and we had a successful yard care experience the next time.

But, I had put off lawn service for a couple of weeks, because the grass was not growing that quickly.  Last week, I had meant to contact the lawn service to come to mow, but forgot, on Sunday, and Monday, when I arrived home from work the front lawn was mowed, but because the gates to the back lawn were locked, the back was not done. My lawn service person did not contact me about that, but when I contacted her, said she had forgotten to text me about the schedule. No harm, it needed to be done, but the crew did not trim the tall grass near my front ivy, so I asked her to reschedule them for this week, to do the back yard, and the tall grass near the ivy. They came today, as scheduled, did not do the tall grass near the front ivy, and left part of the area under the clothesline uncut outside of the area picketed off for the vinca.

It is obvious to me that when I schedule lawn care, I need to be very specific about what needs to be done.   If I do that the next time I have yard care scheduled, and do not get what I want, I will start looking for another yard care service.