Weeding and mulching

I did a quote for a client in early April, before most things, including the weeds had started growing. So it was hard to know how much time it would take to weed them. She had some bags of red mulch in her garage and there was already red mulch on the gardens. I told her to buy another 20 bags of the mulch. Then last week she message me and said that her son had a trailer and would pick up some mulch (unbagged) and dump it in her yard. She did not tell me that her son bought the natural colored mulch. When he dumped it in her yard, he dumped it on some grass beside the driveway, and never put a tarp under it.

So when we got there today, there were a lot of dandelions in the gardens. She never told me she never weeded last summer. All of the gardens had to be weeded by hand, so that took more time. Having to wheelbarrow the mulch into the gardens was more time consuming than using bags. And using a different color mulch meant putting a thicker coat of mulch on the beds and you had to be careful when spreading it so as not to disturb the existing mulch.

Then we ran out of mulch because having to put a 3 inch coat of mulch on the gardens instead of a 1 - 2 inch top up, makes a big difference. But I am not going back for free. What I quoted as a 2 - 2.5 hour job took 3.5 hours and it is still not done.

After we finished today I had to take a run to a nursery in Windsor to pick up a couple of trees to plant tomorrow.

A year ago, I asked the landlord a question about what to do about some plants that had died in the gardens here. She never answered me. When I sent her an invoice a couple of weeks ago, I asked her again what should be done. I am tired of looking out the window at the dead cotoneaster. She finally answered me today, and said yes, they can be replaced.