Montmorency gardens are established, hilly and full of trees. When the pruning pile outgrows the green bin, Ross loads it up and takes it away.
Not a franchisee or a truck driver from a booking system. The bloke who quotes it is the bloke who loads it.
No bags to fill, no skip to load. Leave it in a pile and he loads it, sweeps up and takes it away.
Not a bin size. A heap beside the driveway and one at the bottom of a steep yard are different jobs and get different prices.
Standing tree, asbestos, or more rubbish than garden — he tells you before he starts, not after.
A pruning pile hauled away and a few bags of leaf litter collected is the usual combination on a Montmorency block.
Piles of prunings, branches, hedge trimmings, leaves and weeds that won't fit in the green bin. Ross backs the trailer in, loads it himself and takes it away to be recycled — you don't lift a thing.
Hedge trimmings and prunings from hillside yards.
Doing a big garden clean-up — overgrown beds, a back corner nobody has touched in years, a rental between tenants or a property being tidied for sale? Pile it all up and Ross collects the lot in one visit.
Rentals and pre-sale tidy-ups.
Fallen limbs, shed bark, leaf litter and dry prunings gathered up from around the house — the fine fuel that matters most in a grassfire or ember attack. Collected and taken away before the Fire Danger Period starts.
Litter and dry growth cleared before summer.
A gum has dropped a limb across the driveway, or a windy night has left the yard covered. Ross collects what's come down and hauls it away. Standing trees and hung-up limbs are an arborist's job — once they've dropped it, Ross can take it away.
Branches down across yards and driveways.
Montmorency sits on the hills between Greensborough and Eltham, with the Hurstbridge train line running through it. Its streets wind up and down the slopes, and most houses date from the post-war decades through to the 1980s, on quarter-acre style blocks with mature gardens front and back.
The mix of exotic and native trees is what keeps residents busy. Liquidambars and ornamentals drop leaves in autumn, gums shed all year, and hedges along the front fence need a regular trim. Ross handles the green waste removal Montmorency households can't fit in the bin: he loads the whole pile, sweeps up and takes it away.
Most jobs here are a pile from a weekend of pruning, a hedge cut back after being left too long, or a backlog of branches and leaves in the corner of the yard. Sometimes it's all three.
Ross packs the longer branches tightly in the trailer, loads the rest by hand and sweeps the spot where the pile was. You don't need to bag anything or cut it into bin-sized pieces first.
A lot of Montmorency houses change hands or tenants with gardens that have got away from them. Agents want a clean yard for photos, landlords want the property back in shape between leases, and new owners often inherit a jungle out the back.
A garden clean-up takes it back to something manageable. Once the overgrowth has been cut and the dead stuff pulled out, Ross loads the lot and takes it away, so the yard is ready for a gardener, a buyer or the next tenant.
Some Montmorency driveways are steep, and plenty of back yards are only reachable down a narrow side path or a set of steps. That affects how long a job takes, so it is worth mentioning when you get in touch.
Photos of the pile and the route out to the street let Ross price it accurately first time. He'll carry it out by hand where the trailer can't get close.
Montmorency backs onto bushier country to the north and east, so it makes sense to clear dry litter and dead growth from around the house by late spring. Autumn is the other busy period, when the deciduous trees let go and the green bin can't keep up with the leaves.
Suburb, roughly how much there is, and what the access is like. A photo saves a lot of back and forth.
Ross comes back with a number. On big or awkward jobs he has a look first rather than guessing.
Loaded by hand, driveway swept, and off for proper green waste disposal.
Ross runs this on his own. He quotes the job, he turns up, he loads the trailer and he takes it away — the same bloke every visit. There is no office in between, no skip company, and no franchise cut coming out of what you pay.
It also means he will tell you when something isn't his job — a standing tree that needs an arborist, or a pile that is more rubbish than garden — rather than taking the money and leaving you with half a problem.
The suburb, roughly how much there is, and how easy it is to get a trailer to it is enough to work with. A photo of the pile gets you a price fastest.
Prefer to talk? Call or text Ross on 0416 030 925. Monday to Saturday, daylight hours — weather permitting.
Get a price on your pile. Takes a minute — Ross reads them himself.
Thanks — that's gone through to Ross. Spring is his busiest time, so if it's close to fire season he may take a day or two.
