A friend of mine recently moved to a bungalow house surrounded by a garden. She doesn’t have the time to tend the flowers herself so she plans on hiring a gardener to tend the place in a part-time basis. For folks out there who have experience dealing with professional gardeners, what’s the standard rate for part-time gardeners? Thanks.
What gardeners charge will depend on exactly what they'll be doing. If you take a look around at some ads, you'll notice that most gardeners charge from $10 — $15 an hour for weeding and the like. If you want to hire a skilled gardener then you'll have to pay a lot more. They charge $30 or more an hour. But that doesn't necessarily mean you' have to pay someone per hour. You can negotiate and have them work for a flat rate, say $XX every other Saturday when they aren't working elsewhere.
The price depends on the reputation of the gardener too and how busy they are. If it's a regular contract like my neighbor has it can be cheaper because they can work it into their schedule (say once a month when they are free). I would say at least $15-20 an hour depending how big the garden is and what needs to be done. Most will do an estimate, then maintenance can be cheaper.
I think gardeners charge a price slightly higher than a minimun wage hourly pay rate. It all depends of the person, reputation is a key part of service delivery business, a bad cheap gardener will be less likely to be contacted than a good one charging more for his/her services.
My neighbor is a gardener and he charges us $50 a month and visits our yard twice a month. He cuts, leaf blows and trims edges with the weed whacker. He only does our front yard though and it is a smaller space. You might be able to negotiate a flat fee instead of an hourly wage if that is in your favor.
The costing here is not appropriate as a gauge but nevertheless, I would give you a comparand. When we need to trim the trees or there is a need to pull the weeds, we hire a gardener for a day. It's just half a day actually and we pay him 400 pesos, that's around $10. But our neighbors pay that part-time gardener much less like 200 or 300 pesos only for the same period of work. So maybe what you can do is use the minimum wage as your guideline for the cost of the gardener.
Well, the reasonable salary of a parttime gardener depends on the dynamics of the labour market in the country concerned. In the west, it could be an hourly rate but in most Third World countries, they are some of the least paid cadres. I suppose that the work should be pegged on piecework depending on the amount of labour. This is a difficult question to answer but an hour of work should yield about 3 dollars. This should be for the least skilled and other incentives should not be ruled out.
This is a difficult question to answer - as not only is the amount dependent on the area, the type of service required and the size of the garden - but more importantly on qualifications, skill level in terms of years of experience and whether or not they are licensed and insured. For example - where I live - rates for unskilled work like basic lawn mowing and weeding are usually somewhere around $10-30 per hour - whereas the rate you'd expect to pay for a professional - meaning a skilled, licensed qualified gardener - capable of doing everything from pruning. planting to monitoring and dealing with signs of disease and infestation generally starts at anything from $60 plus - per hour
