Top Lawn Care and Tree Specialists in St. Louis, Missouri

Some years ago I worked as a manager for a restaurant chain. Just starting out, the position didn’t pay all that much so I got together with a fellow manager and we decided to start a little landscaping business on the side. We sealed the deal over a slice of pizza and bought a couple of old lawnmowers and came up with the name of Grasshopper Lawn Care. (Grasshoppers were what the pro guys in the lawn care business called guys like us: part-timers who “hopped” from one lawn to the next.) We started calling other restaurants in the chain and asked them how much they were paying for lawn and landscaping service. After quoting them lower prices than they could ever get with the big boys, we were able to get about eight accounts, which was enough, considering that we were both working about 50 hours a week in the restaurants already..

After a couple of months one of the restaurants called and asked us if we did trees. They had a couple of medium sized ones in front of their store that they needed to have removed. Cut down a couple of trees? “Of course, no problem.” We told them. There was one slight problem though, and that was neither one of us had ever cut down a tree before, or had ever even picked up a chainsaw for that matter. But how hard could it be? We sat down and came up with a plan: we already had a pickup truck, but we would have to buy a chainsaw and rent a chipper so we could turn the leaves and branches into mulch. We could get a chainsaw for about $150.00 and rent the chipper for about another hundred. We gave them a bid of $600.00 for the two trees. Not a bad profit, we thought, for a couple of hours’ work.

We rented the chipper early the next morning and put it in the back of the truck. It was heavy but it was on rollers, so after considerable effort, we secured it… somewhat. We forgot to bring any rope to tie it down, so we had to make do with some twine that the rental place gave us. About halfway down Grand Avenue, one of the busiest thoroughfares in the city, the twine broke and the chipper went sailing over the back of the truck, damaging the gate and landing upside down in the street. We had traffic backed up for about 20 minutes as we struggled to upright the thing and get it back into the truck. Then one of us had to ride in the back with the chipper and hang onto it the rest of the way.

When we finally got the machine to the location and got it off of the truck, we were bruised, tired and sweaty and we hadn’t even started the job yet! After a few minutes of figuring out how to start the chainsaw, my friend Eric started cutting off the tree limbs while I dragged them over to the chipper. The limbs were a lot heavier than they looked, and most of them were too thick to go through the chipper. Then disaster struck. The chain came off of the saw and neither one of us had any idea about how to re-attach it. After almost an hour driving around and looking for a hardware store, we finally found one and asked the clerk if he could help us. He asked if we had bought the saw in his shop…we hadn’t, and he wouldn’t. We went back to the job and after fiddling with the damned chainsaw for a considerable amount of time we finally got it to work again. Then suddenly, as Eric was cutting and I was picking up the limbs, all I could see was green. I also realized that I was lying on the ground with one of the branches on top of me. Luckily it was the leafy part of the branch that had knocked me down, or serious injury might have occurred. From off in the distance I heard Eric yell: “TIMBER!”

All in all it took us well over 2 days to finish the job and we had to rent one of those huge construction dumpsters to put all of the debris into. The final cost was well over a thousand dollars. After expenses, we pretty much did the job for free and our client wasn’t too happy about the extra charges either. The moral of the story is that some work is better left to the professionals, and here are a few of the best outside guys in the St. Louis area:

Total Landscaping, 5320 Lemay Ferry, (314) 416-0517 offers full service landscape design and lawn maintenance service for both residential and commercial customers. They feature the added security of on-site crew supervision and monthly site visits from their management staff. Their award-winning designers can create a beautiful yard for you and do everything required to keep it that way. And yes, they also do trees.

Blazzin Blades Landscaping of Eureka, (866) 290-9686, has earned a rating between 4.5 to 5 out of 5 in the areas of timeliness, cleanliness, budget, quality, value, communication, and courteousness by several independent agencies in the area. They specialize in creating custom retaining walls for your property.

Hansen’s Tree service of O’Fallon (636) 379-1830, claims that their service is exTREEordinary. They have several certified arborists on staff and can help you with diagnosis and treatment of all of your tree problems. They are most like the old-fashioned “tree doctors.” They also do pruning, tree and stump removal, lawn care, and tree protection on construction sites.