On Thu, 14 May 2015 06:51:03 +0100, sacha wrote:

On 2015-05-05 07:25:52 +0000, Broadback said:

Sadly old father time has reduced my gardening activity to very little.
Reluctantly I decided to employ help. I now have a chap who comes once
a week and works hard. However a plants-man he is not. Is there anyway
of ascertaining if anyone advertising as a gardener really is, or just
an odd job man who works in the gardener and has gardening tools?

A properly trained gardener will be expensive by comparison and so they
should be, between £10.00 and £12.00 per hour. It's best to be very
precise about what you want done on each visit and not to issue vague
directions about 'tidying up' because one man's tidying up is another
man's massacre. And tell him not to pull anything out that's just
coming through, in case it's plant not weed and not to deadhead in
autumn in case you want seeds.

I don't think anyone round here could get any kind of gardener for
that sort of money. I have to pay £15/hr for the kind that really only
want to do the kind of stuff that involves machinery or brute force -
no patience or interest in anything else.

A few years ago I tried to get a gardener who knew how to prune and
when, would recognise useful self-sown things, etc. The two I tried
were unreliable for various reasons. I gave up trying after a while,
having talked to others who thought they knew what they were about,
but produced answers that meant I knew I couldn't let them loose on my
garden with confidence.

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Gardening on Wilts/Somerset border
on slightly alkaline clay underlying soil worked for many decades.