Serving Greater Vancouver and the Lower Mainland Since 1992
If you’re not one of those green-fingered types who loves mowing their own lawn, you have probably considered a lawn-care service. The best way to find a reputable service is to ask your neighbors for a recommendation. The proof is in the pudding as the saying goes so if the folks in your neighbourhood have had a positive experience with a firm, that’s usually enough to justify the price. That being said, you may have been tempted by low-prices in advertisements or an offer too good to be true.
Here are the 3 most outrageous lawn-care scams to look out for!
Unless there is a specific reason why you want grass trimmings removed from your lawn and you request this service, this is the most common way that homeowners are overcharged. These days, it is in fact accepted, standard practice to let cutting lay on the lawn. The correct term for this technique is called ‘grass-cycling’ which is a play on the word ‘recycling’, but it’s no gimmick. Grass cuttings actually help prevent weeds in spring and reduce and slow evaporation (promoting water conservation) during the summer months. Grass-cycling is an important part of moving towards an organic, low-maintenance lawn as it provides important organic material for your soil throughout the year. If you are being charged for having these cuttings bagged and removed without having ordered it, not only are you wasting your money and affecting the health of your lawn, the lawn care firm is essentially getting extra money for free.
You should always be aware that lawn companies might be offering you unnecessary treatments that your lawn doesn’t really need. This scam works with a wide variety of lawn-care treatments from aeration to fertilizing. Let’s take the example of aeration where lawn firms use a special machine to dig out hundred of ‘plugs’ of soil from your garden. This is a valuable and essential part of keeping a beautiful lawn but for most homeowners, once a year in the Fall is all the garden needs. If you are being offered this service more than twice per year, there’s a strong chance that it’s unnecessary. Put it this way; a golf course putting green with thousands of players walking across it will only need, at most, two aerations per year in the Spring and Fall. Think twice before accepting a deluge of treatments and ask a knowledgeable friend or garden center expert for their opinion.
This is probably the most common landscaping scam and yet also the hardest to avoid. Unless your lawn starts turning brown and wilting, you probably trust that your lawn-care firm is actually doing what they bill you for. This scam is where the technician bills you for things they never did and usually relies on you being out of your home when they visit. You can try to protect yourself by requesting a detailed bill of all the work carried out but the only sure-fire way to catch rogue lawn-care firms in the act of doing nothing is to monitor your garden with CCTV or stay at home and pretend to be out when they visit.
For ethical lawn-care service you can trust, contact us. We provide landscaping in Coquitlam, Port Moody, Port Coquitlam, and the Vancouver area.
