New estates going in next to older rural blocks. Whether it's the first landscaping job or a paddock full of branches, Ross takes the garden waste 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 Officer 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.
Landscaping offcuts and first-year prunings.
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.
Vacant-looking yards and rental handovers.
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.
Older rural blocks with long dry grass.
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.
Windbreak limbs on the remaining acreage.
Officer has changed about as fast as anywhere around Melbourne. A lot of what was farmland between Beaconsfield and Pakenham is now housing estates, with brand-new homes, young street trees and freshly laid gardens. In between there are still older houses on bigger rural-residential blocks, some with cypress windbreaks and paddocks out the back.
The two sides produce very different green waste. New homes generate landscaping offcuts, clipped hedges and the weeds that take over an unplanted back yard. The older blocks produce branches, long grass and years of dead growth. Ross handles both.
Once the builder hands over, a lot of Officer homeowners spend the first year putting in lawns, garden beds and screening plants. That process throws up a surprising amount of green material: cut-back plants, pulled weeds, trimmed hedging and the vegetation that grew on the lot before anyone moved in.
Ross can take that away in one hit. Plant pots, plastic wrapping, turf rolls with soil attached and builders' rubbish are not green waste, so keep them separate.
Along some of the older roads through Officer there are houses on an acre or more, often with a line of old cypress or gums on the boundary. Those trees drop heavy limbs and produce a lot of debris.
Those blocks also carry more grass through summer. With open country nearby and a Fire Danger Period declared for Cardinia Shire each year, it is worth getting the dead material around the house cleared in spring. Ross can take it away along with any fallen limbs on the same day.
Estate lots in Officer are often narrow, with the garage taking up most of the frontage and a side path barely wide enough for the bins. Ross loads by hand, so a pile in the back yard just has to be carried out through the side.
If you can get the pile to the front before the pickup, it will be quicker. If not, tell him where it is and he will allow for it.
Spring is when new Officer gardens first take off and when older blocks need their fire-season clean-up. Booking from September onward avoids waiting until the December rush.
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.
