If you want the review in a nutshell, here it is: Dave's Organic Gardening did more damage than…read morehelp for our yard. He charged double what he said he would. He would go for long periods without communicating and showing up. And when we asked for clarification on bills that listed visits when his team did not show up, or
for work that was never completed, he got very nasty in his communication.
To read more about our experience with Dave, please read on.
We had high hopes for Dave's Organic Gardening. We hired him after doing extensive landscaping, and our previous gardeners were doing blowing and mowing, but very little active maintenance of the yard. We agreed to pay him double what we had previously been paying, and he promised that he would get the yard in great shape.
He and his team began by replacing plants that weren't doing well, and he encouraged us to use his "tea" to get the plants going. Despite the agreement on $300/month for the maintenance, he began regularly charging us $600+/month. We initially thought that the high rates would go down as soon as the yard got in shape, but the huge invoices kept coming.
To make matters worse, he wouldn't arrive at a regular time each week, which made it difficult to communicate with him on site. In fact, he would go weeks without showing up (as our lawn soon began to look like a meadow of weeds).
One major element that needed help was irrigation, and he promised to get the irrigation of the front and back yard figured out. I gave him access to our irrigation system, yet he only worked on a small portion of the yard (neglecting the irrigation across the majority of the yard). Many plants died as a result.
After months of neglect and infrequent visits (yet continued invoices that kept arriving), we canceled our relationship with him.
Here is a quick list of the reasons we are so unhappy with Dave's Organic Gardening:
1. Some of the plantings that we paid for at the outset were never ordered and planted.
2. Many of the plants that we laid out to be planted in particular places were planted in the wrong place. As a result, some areas are crowded with plants, whereas other areas are empty.
3. A large percentage of the plants that were planted with the expensive compost tea died or are still struggling mightily. In fact, most of the plants that he installed are now dead.
4. We were charged for items in the invoices that were never completed. For example, we needed our vines trimmed, yet they were never done. Even so, his invoices listed these tasks as completed.
5. Irrigation on the yard was only partly completed, yet we were charged for all of it.
6. Regular maintenance was charged for but not provided (e.g., lawn was 2' tall), but invoices kept coming.
7. Dave encouraged us to mulch the garden, but the mulch job was super sloppy. When they installed, they just covered the yard with it, ignoring design elements like a pea gravel border. Worse yet, he charged a lot for the mulch, but we were removing trash and ceramic bits out of the mulch for months.
8. We had to re-do all the pea gravel landscaping that was buried under mulch.
What makes all of this worse (the sloppy work, the dying plants, the exorbitant prices) is that when we asked him to elaborate upon the invoices, especially the ones that came in months late and included dates when he and his team weren't there (my wife and I were home working throughout the pandemic), he was--as others have said--really nasty. He starts out very nice, but he can quickly turn very unprofessional.
Since we let Dave go, we hired another gardener, who charges a fraction of the rate, works very efficiently, and has helped our yard recover from the damage that Dave did.
