GREEN THUMB LAWNCARE & LNDSCP

It is with regret that I have to post a negative review for this landscape service, but the owner, Ron Bickel, has left me with no choice. I began using Green Thumb Lawncare in April of 2013. I am a busy professional with a very nice but small home and yard in the North End. I was looking for not just a mowing service, but a year-round yard and lawn maintenance program to include trimming, mowing, pruning, planting, mulching, spring and fall cleanups, snow removal, poop scooping, sprinkler maintenance, etc, etc. I provided Mr. Bickel with a written agreement and detailed list of the services requested and we signed a contract. I provided him a stable, year-round monthly payment and in turn he was to ensure that the home always looked great. To come to a payment agreement, I generously estimated the average number of hours per month over an entire year that should be required for the service, then paid him at his hourly rate for that service. In the winter months, he got paid significantly more than the true number of hours worked, but in the spring, summer, and especially fall this evened out. If particularly time consuming projects came up, we were to discuss them and I would make additional payments. Personally, I think it was more than fair arrangement and I paid him a total of well over $2400. We had a bit of a rough start, but after setting expectations better things improved somewhat. I am not a micromanager, and I allow the people I hire a great degree of latitude to get the job done, but I nonetheless expect it to get done. Over the last 6 months Green Thumb's service has progressively worsened and I am incredibly disappointed with the lack of professionalism that has been displayed. The supposedly "full-service" lawn care was nothing more than infrequent mowings, and poor ones at that. There were branches from a tree which I had to prune myself, that I left in the middle of my patio for them to haul away. They were not removed for two months. My wife and I had purchased two potted plants that needed to be transferred to our patio pots. We were leaving town on short notice and asked if they could plant them for us and we were told by the worker that he couldn't because he didn't know how. Despite repeated requests, weeds were not pulled and trimming was not completed. I have never seen so many weeds throughout my entire lawn as I have now. Over the last 2 months I have made repeated attempts to contact Mr. Bickel and he has not returned my messages. No one has shown up for over 3 weeks to mow. Regrettably, the way our arrangement worked, he essentially got paid in advance for the upcoming fall cleanup, which I will now have to hire out to someone else. In short, Green Thumb Lawncare is unprofessional and does a very poor job. Do yourself a favor and hire someone else for your lawn and garden needs.