We cut the wire basket and score every root ball before it goes into Pittsburgh clay.
- Coordinates
- 40.3838° N / 80.0201° W
- Service radius
- 18 miles of Pittsburgh, PA 15228
- Office line
- +1 (897) 555-6004
- Office hours
- Calls answered by the crew that runs your route
A shrub set root-bound and whole is usually dead within a year. We've replaced enough of those from other outfits' installs to build the whole company around not doing it that way.
Renata Kessler started with one mower and a trailer in 2011.
Four people to a crew, four trucks between the two.
Mowing programs, planting beds, and drainage jobs combined.
April through October. Not whenever the truck has room.
What we do on a Pittsburgh lot
Six services, priced on six different bases. No lawn chemicals, no tree removal, no masonry. Full detail and price basis for each one lives on the services page.
- 01 Grounds Maintenance Program Fourteen-day cycle, April through October, edging and blow-off included every visit. No chemical lawn programs added on. Per-visit, seasonal contract
- 02 Ornamental Plantings Wire basket cut, root ball scored, before anything goes in the hole. No planting into August heat without an irrigation plan set first. Per bed, by plant count
- 03 Pruning & Shaping Dormant-season structural cuts, summer shaping, hand tools only on ornamentals so the cambium doesn't get torn. Per hour, per group
- 04 Mulch & Bed Edging Double-shredded hardwood mulch over steel-edged lines cut fresh each spring, not dyed chip dumped on top of last year's layer. Per cubic yard installed
- 05 Drainage & Slope Correction French drain and solid pipe for lots over 8% grade. No gravel over fabric, because clay on a slope will move it within two seasons. Per linear foot of drain
- 06 Seasonal Cleanup Spring bed clearing and fall leaf removal, debris hauled off the same day rather than bagged and left at the curb. Per visit, by lot size
Why the same fix keeps showing up on someone else's job
Two failure modes account for most of the repair work we get called in on. Neither one is exotic, and neither is expensive to prevent at install time.
Most of the call-backs we inherit from other companies are drainage and root-ball failures, not bad luck.
Pittsburgh does not hand out flat lots. A yard that reads level from the sidewalk is usually running an 8 to 15 percent grade by the time it reaches the back fence, and clay under that grade holds water the way a suburban tract lot never would. Treat it like flat ground and you get a soaked bed by June and a call asking why the boxwoods are yellow.
We correct grade with French drain trenching and solid PVC discharge pipe, not gravel dumped over a sheet of landscape fabric. Gravel-over-fabric looks finished on install day and slides downhill within two seasons on anything over 8 percent grade. We've dug enough of it out of other crews' failed jobs to know exactly how it fails, and we don't install it, full stop.
The pipe runs to a discharge point that's actually lower than everything feeding into it, which sounds obvious until you've seen a drain installed with a dip in the middle because nobody checked the fall with a level. We check it with a laser level before backfill, not after a client calls to say the trench is standing water again.
The other failure we see constantly is root-bound stock planted whole, wire basket and all, because it's faster to drop it in the hole than to cut the basket and score the ball first. A boxwood planted that way in August heat is often dead by the following June. It looks fine at planting. The roots never leave the shape of the container, and the plant slowly strangles itself over a full growing season.
We score every root ball and cut the wire basket before anything goes into the ground, on every job, regardless of whether the client asked for it. We also won't rush a planting into August heat without an irrigation plan already in place, because a shrub with a cut root ball needs water on a schedule for the first few weeks, not whenever it rains.
None of this shows on install day. A properly scored root ball and a gravel-free drain trench both look like plain dirt to a homeowner standing on the lawn. The difference shows up eighteen months later, in whether the boxwood is still green and whether the basement stays dry through a wet spring. That's the bet we're asking you to make on a crew you haven't watched work yet.
Two crews. One number. The person on your lot is the person who answers your call.
Every property on the books gets the same two crew leads for the whole season, not whoever a dispatch app happened to route that morning. Eight people, split four and four, four trucks between them. If you call about a bed that looks off, you're talking to someone who has actually stood on your grass.
That structure costs more to run than a rotating labor pool. We keep it anyway, because half of what we get called back to fix on other companies' work traces to nobody on the crew remembering what the lot did last spring.
We don't run chemical lawn programs and we don't do tree removal or masonry. Both are common enough add-ons for outfits our size to bolt on, and both would mean training crew members on work that isn't the planting and grounds trade we started in. A smaller list of things, done the same way every time by the same two crews, is the whole point.
| Crew size | 4 people per crew, 2 crews |
|---|---|
| Trucks | 4 total, 2 assigned per crew |
| Route structure | Fixed weekly route, same two leads all season |
| Response window | On-site estimate within 5 business days |
What's actually on the trucks
No specialty gear rented for the day and no subcontracted crews. If it isn't on one of the four trucks, we don't offer the service.
| Mowing | Walk-behind mowers, string trimmers, backpack blowers |
|---|---|
| Pruning | Hand pruners and loppers, no gas hedge trimmers on ornamentals |
| Drainage | Trenching tools, laser level, solid PVC pipe, no corrugated pipe |
| Edging | Half-moon steel edger, spades, wheelbarrows for mulch |
What happens if a plant doesn't take
Twelve months on every shrub and tree we plant.
One replacement, no charge, no argument.
Drought and deer damage are on you, not us.
A shrub we plant that dies in the first twelve months from anything but drought or deer gets replaced once, free. Full terms are on the terms and warranty page. If you want the details before you call, that's where they live.
The guarantee covers plants we install ourselves, on beds we set up. It doesn't stretch to mowing damage, storm loss across a whole bed, or drought that never got flagged in an irrigation check. Those get handled case by case, and we'll tell you that on the phone rather than after the invoice.
What to have ready when you pick up the phone
The faster we can picture the lot, the faster a number attaches to it.
- The street address. Grade and soil shift block to block on the hillier side of the city, so we look up the parcel before we quote a shape of job.
- Whether the ground slopes toward the house or away from it.
- How long the current beds or lawn have gone without real attention.
- Whether anything planted there has died in the last two years, and roughly where on the lot.
- A rough sense of budget range, even a wide one, since it saves a wasted site visit if the scope and the number turn out to be far apart.
What we turn down on purpose
No chemical lawn programs. We don't spray, and we won't sell one that leads there.
No gravel over fabric on a slope. It moves.
No rushed planting into August heat without an irrigation plan set first.
No tree removal, no masonry. We stick to planting and grounds.
Turning down work is a smaller business than saying yes to everything. It's also the reason a crew that's been running since 2011 still fits in four trucks instead of ten.
Call the office. You'll get one of the two people who actually run your route.