That £26.50/hour for weeding is insanity?

[LaBellySausage]

I'm looking for someone to come around for 3 hours/week to help with weeding the garden.

I was given a couple of names of local people who do gardening. I expected to pay somewhere between £10-12/hour, perhaps £15/hour if the person was an experienced gardener. I believe minimum wage is £8something but I don't think people can live on that.

The first person wouldn't give a quote til they came to view the garden and then was hesitant to give an hourly rate, preferring to give a rate for 'the job'. It's not a job that can be finished- it's like when I shave my legs the bastards on the other one have started growing back when I start the second. I just want a few weeds less per week. He eventually said £18/hour. I thanked him for his time but said it was a bit more than I had budgeted. The second guy said £26.50/hour!

This is simple weeding. Trowel and hoe provided. £26.50/hour is about £55,000 annually.

I worked jobs like this while in uni at minimum wage. For reference, we live in a very inexpensive part of the country- he would not be weeding Chelsea Flower Show. Both candidates were local so didn't have more than a 5/10 minute drive.

Am I being unreasonable, or is this a crazy rate?

City dwellers probably. Part of gardening is weeding. The OP can't due to physical problems, but it's hardly rocket science.

We were just given a bucket - told what was the plant planted and how to identify it by the leaves (aged 7 I never plucked up a few spuds) and told to pull everything around said plant. Such an easy job for a teenager to earn a few bucks.

If a 7 year old could do it, a teenager could.

Are you sure you weren’t 5?

Children on farms are expected to help out from an early age. The two down the road have been shepherding since they were about three. Both competent farmers now at 18 and 21.

OP I had a look locally NW and a skilled person is about £18-20 and some start around £10. Try gardening club members or pensioners. My DH is a dab hand at weeding after the first lockdown. I would do it for that price. Just been looking at some jobs in the care sector and I would get the princely sum of £8.70 an hour to look after a vulnerable person!

As a 7 year old, sometimes it would involve you standing up and pulling said weed with all your might lol. Farmer's daughter innit. I doubt I was particularly productive. Slave labour looking back. We were rewarded with rice (the sweet kind) which had been boiled for 2 hours and served with stewed rhubarb. That would have been lunch. Creamed rice is it called? Anyway, the same as you get in a tin, but cooked from home from scratch.

@JackieWeaverIsTheAuthority

Are you sure you weren’t 5?

TBH I was familiar with a duster from age 5 lol. Picking stones at that age too. Standing in gaps to herd cattle. All sorts of shit. No such things as soft play. You were useful and that was that. Peeling spuds, carrots, in charge of dinners cooking aged 9 and letting everything boil dry. Still can't cook to this day lol.

I'm a gardener for a living and I charge £20/£22 per hour. For that you get someone with 20 years experience and a qualified horticulturalist. I have to buy and maintain tools including expensive items like petrol mowers and hedge trimmers etc. I have to maintain a vehicle that gets me to jobs and is large enough to carry tools. O

Posted too soon.
I often get jobs where someone has paid someone cheap to sort out the garden and they have half destroyed it but hacking back shrubs etc. And now it needs saving.
Despite all of this, I can assure you that I don't earn anything like £55,000 a year!

About £16-£20 pH here. Even a self employed person on minimum wage of £8.72 pH would need a 30% uplift so £12-£13 to include tax & national insurance costs.

It's ridiculous to compare the hourly rate of someone self employed to the hourly rate of someone employed.

It's a completely different thing.

An employee doesn't have work costs to deduct from their wages. An employee gets sick pay and holiday pay. An employee gets paid for contacted hours whether or not they are busy. An employee gets paid to do admin tasks associated with their job. And if the employer was to hire out an employee, they would normally charge at least double the employees hourly rate - because there are other costs of employing someone other than just their hourly rate.

As much as I hate gardening with passion I'm more than prepared to rethink my career if that's the going rate. Talking about pricing themselves out of a bloody job.

I think if you pay someone as a one off it may be more money to sort the garden out and after that surely they can come once a month to maintain it.
Weekly seems a bit much.

I wouldn't charge any less than £20 an hour if I were a gardener. Back-breaking work, literally (a lot of gardeners have back problems by their 30s) plus many have qualifications and/or a wealth of experience.

The real money is in garden design though.

As above said an experienced gardener will be about 15-20 pound an hour so perhaps contact a local university to see if you can put an ad in for around 12 pound an hours help for say 5 hours a week general help

Let's hope the teenager you pay peanuts to doesn't pull up your favourite plants.

If these trained horticulturists are weeding your garden for £12 an hour, they can't also take on the work that's actually worth £26 an hour - garden design and landscaping and that stuff. Clearly people pay it or they wouldn't be in business.

I struggle to believe that a teenager would be able to weed a border in April and know the difference between weed seedlings and seedlings of plants I’d want to keep. Or would know which weeds can be pulled out by hand, which need all the roots digging out, which need weed killer. Would they know which plants to prune, when and how? Obviously some would know, but I’d want someone with better plant knowledge.

Teenagers fine for cutting the grass, edging, clearing overgrown patches where everything comes out.

@GreenlandTheMovie

Chomalumga How do you price a job in the real world? How do you know what the going rate is?

Good question. I'm an expert in what the job was and was employed to do it at one time. I know what the going rate is and how difficult the job was.

If people can't survive on their freelance incomes, then it might be time for them to look for more regular employment. Obviously not everyone can find it at present! But yes, we live in a world where the reality is NMW or £10 an hour for carers, so asking £22.50 plus £5 travel for an unskilled job (not gardening) is chancing it.

If you were employed to do it - I guess you were not employed for just a few hours a day to do it?

Whereas you wanted someone to do it for a few hours a day, which obviously makes a difference to their weekly earning potential.

Unfortunately we live in a world of zero hours, low pay, gig economy, people only being paid a low wage for the time they work and not being paid for the time it takes between jobs etc....so annual income is low.

Asking someone for 3 hrs work means prob 4 with travelling etc and may mean they can only fit another short job in

This.

@Awwlookatmybabyspider

As much as I hate gardening with passion I'm more than prepared to rethink my career if that's the going rate. Talking about pricing themselves out of a bloody job.

Again, that's not what they'd take home each day.

So many people on this thread seem blissfully unaware of the costs of being self-employed. They might charge £26 an hour but they won't bring home anywhere close to that amount.

Yes, unfortunately Chomalunga there just aren't enough people around wanting to pay someone £22.50 per hour plus travel costs for unpaid manual work. Since when did being willing to do a proper employed job because something to beat someone over the head with? In that industry, while there are plenty of jobs for people prepared to work full days as a permanent emoyyee, there aren't many jobs at all for the little madams and emperors who want to charge excessive hourly rates for the same thing. And they are usually little madams and emperors, because they can't handle the discipline to do a regular job.

The person I did end up employing at £14 an hour actially did a 5 days per week part time job as well. But she was prepared to work, rather than lecture people on how good she was and how expensive her life was and how big her overheads were. I'm not prepared to subsidise someone for their life choice to work only a few hours per week.

There are skilled trades that are worth £25 per hour and more. That wasn't one of them. Neither is weeding and basic gardening. Horticulture and garden design might be. Otherwise, yiure looking at people with university degrees or highly skilled in well remunerated fields to be worth that. Not just a sorry take about having to pay tax and NI and travel between jobs.

I know my teenagers would do it like a shot especially if they could stick their earbuds in and surely you could just show them what is weed and what isn’t?? I would have guessed at £10-£15 an hour.

Would once a month for say a whole day be a better and perhaps cheaper option overall?

If we were in normal times, I would suggest contacting a local college which has horticulture courses and see if any students would be interested. Other than that, you need an odd job man.