Question for you guys here who cut grass for a living or as a summer gig:

Is it expected that the person mowing the lawn will pick up trash/paper in the path of the mower?

My FIL is using the guy I started using last year but was complaining that he had ran over several pieces of trash/paper that had blown into his lawn and puréed them onto the lawn.

I got into sort of an argument over this and maintained that the lawn guy is there to cut the grass, he’s not there to pick up trash. I said maybe if there’s a rock or a big limb he would move it but it’s really not his job to go police up the yard first.

My FIL insists he should be and will start docking him if he does it again, I told him he’s going to end up getting fired as a customer if he does that.

Thoughts?

Similar situation, I am fortunate to have a house cleaner come to my home once a week. Out of respect for the work she does, I ensure that the house is at least “tidied”, the beds stripped with folded sheets on the beds for them to make and the sink area is clean. I don’t expect her to need to clean up my messes before she can actually do the job I am paying her for.

Not in the lawn-business, but I agree with you 100% on every count. To include your FIL potentially being fired as a client.

Nope, I’m there to mow. I don’t pick up trash or poop. I will pick up a news paper or something that will make a huge mess. However, plastic bottles get chopped and chucked wherever they land. Napkins and McDonald’s wrappers get shredded. If the homeowner doesn’t care enough to clean up the lawn and not throw their trash in it, why should I?

The lawn service is most likely there on the same weekday so your FIL knows when to walk the lawn and pick up his garbage.

It’s a cutthroat business, the prices are too low to add an extra 20 minutes to walk the lawn to look for and pick up every little piece of garbage. Unless your FIL wants to offer the services an extra $20 to do a weekly cleanup first, he’s being unrealistic. He should ask, maybe they will offer this as an add on service.

You also can’t dock a service’s pay. You can fire them but you pay what they say, with state sales tax, or else you will find yourself in small claims court. You’ll also find that no one will take the job afterward because we’re all friends and we call each other if we get a gut feeling about a potential troublesome customer.

It depends on the contract. My office is located in a business complex and the landlord provides the lawn mowing service. By nature of the contract they are to pick up the garbage in the parking lot and whatever blows out of the pickups driving by. Of course I pick up my homelawn of paper.

Here in northwest Ohio, on Lake Erie, there is a lot of summer places, lawn care service is proportionately high because of that reason. Granted these are not the type of people to leave trash in their yards but if I was paying what some of these people are paying, I’d be highly pissed if they ran a wrapper or plastic bottle in my yard and left a mess. Again I understand that not all locations are equal.

Never seen the residential mowers just run over debris.

All have grabbers that they use. Maybe make a call to the office.
If they do not
Know that it's broke , they can't fix it

quote:

Originally posted by bendable:
… Maybe make a call to the office. …

The office number rings the cell phone of the guy riding the mower.

^^^^^^^^^^
Maybe lawn service in Iowa is high tech with an actual office of operations.

quote:

Originally posted by Oaklane:
Here in northwest Ohio, on Lake Erie, there is a lot of summer places, lawn care service is proportionately high because of that reason. Granted these are not the type of people to leave trash in their yards but if I was paying what some of these people are paying, I’d be highly pissed if they ran a wrapper or plastic bottle in my yard and left a mess. Again I understand that not all locations are equal.

Yeah, that’s a little different. If there’s a contact for cleanup and the price is premium, then yeah.

In my area, I’m paid to mow, blow and go. I’m not spending an hour on a $20 lawn. I mean, I won’t purposely make a mess and I do try to leave the area better than how I found it but it’s always the same people that leave trash in the lawn, which is very few. They’re generally not the people you mind losing as customers.

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
^^^^^^^^^^
Maybe lawn service in Iowa is high tech with an actual office of operations.

They’d probably be doing something other than mowing.

I cut commercial in school. Walmarts, apartment complexes, etc. we always picked up trash before mowing it. No exceptions.

quote:

Originally posted by Oz_Shadow:
I cut commercial in school. Walmarts, apartment complexes, etc. we always picked up trash before mowing it. No exceptions.

That’s a whole different topic. Cleanup is in the contact and included in the price.

“If the homeowner doesn’t care enough to clean up the lawn and not throw their trash in it, why should I?“

Any trash in my yard I damn sure didn’t throw there. The wind blows a LOT here, I could pick up the paper and bottles and on a windy day, 30 minutes later there could be a fresh batch. And my neighborhood is graced with a certain amount of lowbrow pedestrian traffic.

I’d suggest the OP’s FIL have a polite, respectful talk with the yard man to see if there’s any way for his expectations to be satisfied.

And I sure wish I could find a person to mow for $20. Even $40. They could mow the trash if it was that cheap.

A good question to ask when signing up with a service. I ask that along with other things like what happens if it rains on mow day? Mow next day?, call to schedule a day/time? Do you alternate mow patterns? What height are your mowers set and do you adjust as the season progresses? etc. Get it all settle up front, but I think you can still ask these questions even they've been on the job awhile.

quote:

Originally posted by mark123:

quote:

Originally posted by Oz_Shadow:
I cut commercial in school. Walmarts, apartment complexes, etc. we always picked up trash before mowing it. No exceptions.

That’s a whole different topic. Cleanup is in the contact and included in the price.

Everyone doing residential on weekends as a side gig did the same. There’s a difference hitting some cigarette butts vs. intentionally mowing over a newspaper. Some things I could see letting slide, others, no.

It's probably noted in the contract what they will do.
When I used to do it, we always picked up trash in the yard. The one exception was commercial accounts that had a smoke break area or such. All those butts would turn into cotton balls and we might blow them into nearby bark beds afterward.
The worst was a gas station on my route. We made an effort to get most of the litter.

But for residential accounts, if there were hoses or trampolines or kids/dog toys, branches, etc., they got picked up or moved.

Newspaper = mulch.

quote:

Originally posted by LS1 GTO:
Newspaper = mulch.

For us it was picking up one piece or 100's of pieces.

When I mowed for money I kept an ez reacher and a trash bucket on my zero turn's foot well and I picked up paper and trash that makes a big visual mess. Didn't take much extra time and I did not shut down my blades putting extra wear on the clutch.

When I first started as a foreman of a commercial grounds crew, the previous guy used to just let the mowers mulch the paper. My previous experience had been in high end residential, and I put a stop to that immediately for no other reason than it made the property look terrible. Many residents, and the property manager commented favorably to me about this change. From my perspective, it's a matter of quality, guys who don't pick up the paper are not interested in the appearance of the finished "product," they are just there to get paid. As a customer, I'd expect to pay a little more for a quality job than a run-of-the-mill one.

I completely understand the perspective of those who feel it isn't their job, "if the customer doesn't care enough to pick up their trash, why should I?" I just don't think that you are being paid to walk back and forth behind a mower, but to change an unsightly view into a more polished one.

Dog poop is another story, mow over the low ones, and around the ones that will foul your mower deck. I never told my guys they had to police the poop, that's the pet owner's job.