Teesside gardening FAQs

£20 to £30 an hour for one gardener, £40 to £55 for a two-person team. A fortnightly maintenance visit is £35 to £60, mowing alone £18 to £35, and a one-off tidy-up £150 to £450.

Yes. The garden is looked at properly, the work is set out in writing, and you take your time deciding.

Access, waste volume, hedge height and planting density. A garden reached only through the house takes far longer to clear than one with a driveway alongside, whatever the lawn measures.

By the job for anything with a clear endpoint, such as hedges, clearance or jet washing. Hourly suits open-ended work, and it is worth agreeing a cap before it starts.

Fortnightly from March to October suits most gardens here, moving to monthly or six-weekly over winter. Weekly makes sense on larger plots during peak growth in May and June.

Mowing, edging, weeding borders, dead-heading, sweeping hard surfaces and taking the clippings away. Hedges, pruning and planting are scheduled or quoted on top.

You should not be. A fair arrangement runs visit by visit or month by month with short notice. Long lock-ins and large upfront payments are unusual for domestic garden work.

The visit usually moves within the same week. Mowing saturated clay tears the surface and leaves ruts, so a gardener who reschedules is protecting your lawn.

Any time, provided no active nest is disturbed. Because birds nest from roughly March to August, the main cut is normally taken from late August, and earlier work is checked first.

Only into green growth. It never reshoots from bare brown wood, so a face cut into the brown stays brown permanently.

You are, until it reaches an authorised person. Ask for the waste carrier registration number and check it on the Environment Agency register, because householders can be fined if their waste is fly-tipped.

£70 to £95 a cubic yard for green waste locally. Mixed waste with timber, plastics or rubble costs more, and a quote should separate disposal from labour.

Most of the conurbation sits on heavy glacial clay, and on newer estates the topsoil is thin over compacted subsoil. Water reaches that pan and stops.

Salt-tolerant species: griselinia, escallonia, elaeagnus, hebe and sea buckthorn all cope at Redcar, Marske and Seaton Carew. Soft-leaved evergreens scorch on the seaward face.

Grass generally starts moving in the second half of March and keeps going into late October. Moor-edge gardens above Guisborough run about a fortnight behind the coast at each end.

Far from it. Clearance, dormant pruning, hedge work on deciduous species and structural jobs are all easier, cheaper and quicker to book between November and February.