How Much Does Landscape Maintenance Cost? A Detailed Breakdown
Landscape maintenance has an incredibly wide range of services, providers, and the value they bring to your property. From a teenager with a truck and a lawn mower, to a highly organized professional company with multiple levels of oversight, you’ll find pricing that varies dramatically depending on who you call. While there are plenty of low budget operators on the market, we routinely talk to people who have been let down by going with the lowest bidder, and seek to provide a level of service that far exceeds basic expectations. Here is the breakdown of costs associated with what we consider the highest level of Sonoma County landscape maintenance.
How Much Does it Cost to Hire Experienced Landscape Maintenance Technicians?
Most people consider landscape maintenance a low-level job that anyone can do. However understanding proper techniques for pruning, fertilization, and irrigation for the hundreds if not thousands of plants regularly installed in landscapes takes many years of experience and expertise developed through rigorous training.
Costs for qualified landscaping technicians, including all overhead such as licensure, insurance, taxes, workers compensation, starts at $50/hr for mid-level experience and reaches $80-100/hour for top level professionals.
How Much Does it Cost to Fertilize a Landscape Each Year?
How much your landscape costs to keep fertilized can vary greatly depending on types of planting materials, and methods used for fertilization. Lawns, Rose Gardens, and food producing gardens tend to consume the most nutrients and require regular feeding. Through our regenerative landscaping approach, we encourage the use of high quality organic, locally sourced compost as the primary method for fertilization as it feeds both the soil foodweb, and the plants directly.
Compost Application
Applying compost is very cost effective and approx $125 covers labor and materials to install a single cubic yard which can cover approx. 165 square feet of area. The winter is most effective to allow rain to wash nutrients into the soil.
Organic Fertilizers
Applying organic granular fertilizers to lawns, such as EB Organic Lawn Food, costs $50 per 20lb bag which covers approx. 2,000 sf of lawn. Lawn fertilizers would be applied at least three times per year, especially when preparing your lawn for summer. While compost can be applied to lawns, generally granular fertilizer is less impactful and more effective.
Additional Areas
Fertilizing other landscape areas such as orchards, shrubs, or rose gardens can costs a similar amount to lawns, as most granular fertilizers have relatively similar costs despite their composition.
How Much Does it Cost to Mow a Lawn?
Mowing around 10,000 sf of lawns with a standard 21” mower can be completed in roughly an hour, so long as the area is relatively flat and without obstacles. Considering crew travel, labor, and equipment, mowing about 2,500 sf of lawn should cost around $40 per week, making it a very labor intensive and costly landscape feature.
How Much Does it Cost to Maintain an Irrigation System?
Irrigation systems have many components, some are highly complex, others relatively straightforward. While water saving techniques can help you save money on utilities, costs to maintain a sprinkler or drip system can be handled by any qualified landscape maintenance technician at standard maintenance rates ranging from $50-80 per hour. However more complex tasks such as repairs of buried mainlines, or installation or irrigation controllers, valves, or flow meters often require a specialized irrigation technician. A typical rate for a qualified irrigation technician will range from $100-150 per hour.
Irrigation Inspections
Inspired Landscapes includes maintenance of an irrigation system within our monthly service agreements. For irrigation start ups at the beginning of each year, we allocate approximately 30 minutes per station, per year for investigation and cleaning. This includes testing and inspecting the valve box, wiring, and controller for proper operation, visually inspecting all emissions devices, and cleaning the valves and emissions devices as necessary.
Time and Cost
A property owner should expect that for every valve they have in their system, they will spend about 30 minutes to 1 hour per year on maintenance, plus a modest budget for materials. With this in mind, a 10-station irrigation system will likely cost in the range of $600-$1,300 per year.
Qualified Techs
A property owner who hires a qualified landscape maintenance team capable of making repairs and inspections without the need to hire a specialized irrigation technician will see considerable savings. This is true both in due to consistent maintenance being completed at a lower hourly rate, and avoiding potential catastrophic issues that result from lack of qualified technicians regularly keeping an eye on the system.
How Much Does Weed Eating and Brush Clearing Cost?
Weedeating and brush clearing is an essential task for fire prevention in Sonoma county and most property owners need to address non-landscaped areas of their property in order to reduce risk of fire.
Weedeating thick, knee to waist high grass can be completed at the rate of approx. 1,200 sf per hour. Including crew mobilization, equipment, labor, and clean up, a property owner should expect to pay approx. $850 for every 10,000 square feet of area to be cut. This rate could be much lower if your area can be mowed rather than cut with a weed eater.
Average Costs
Costs of brush clearing can vary greatly which can make knowing what to expect from your landscape maintenance contractor more complicated. The type of brush, height, thickness, and if the cleared material needs to be hauled off site to a composting facility or dump, will all affect pricing. However typically brush can be cleared at around one third rate of weed eating, meaning a property owner can expect to pay approx $2,500 for every 10,000 sf of brush to be cleared.
Costs of dumping green waste debris varies depending on the type of material to be dumped, distance to the nearest composting/dumping facility, and access for trucks/dump trailers to the area being cleared.
Green Waste
Green waste that doesn’t include logs costs about $35-40 per ton to dump and a standard dump truck or trailer will carry approximately two tons worth of green waste before reaching its volume capacity.
Cost Per Truck Load
Considering labor, trucking, and dumping fees, a property owner should expect to spend approx. $300-400 for every truck load of debris to be loaded and hauled to a composting or dumping facility.
Trust Inspired Landscapes for Fair-Priced Maintenance Service!
At Inspired Landscapes, we specialize in high-quality landscape maintenance, offering expert care tailored to your property’s unique needs. Whether you require routine lawn care, irrigation maintenance, seasonal fertilization, or fire-safe brush clearing, our team is here to help. Contact us today or give us a call at (707) 395-7474 for a consultation and let’s create a maintenance plan that keeps your landscape thriving!
