Garden House-Calls

Did you know that George makes Garden House-Calls to help you improve your own landscape?

What’s a Garden House-Call?

George measuring a client's yard for a landscape design.

Garden House-Calls is a gardening information and landscape design service that George has been offering since 1999 in the Harrisburg, Pa., area.   It’s aimed at people who want to do their own yard and garden work but who need a little guidance along the way.

Each Garden House-Call is tailored individually, whether you’re planning a new garden, trying to mend a landscape mess you’ve inherited or simply trying to figure out how to care for the plants you’ve got.

Why a House-Call?

In a world where everything is automatic, pre-recorded, serve-yourself and/or push-a-button, what’s increasingly rare is good, old-fashioned, friendly, person-to-person service.

That’s what a Garden House-Call is.

It’s not a chain, it’s not a one-size-fits-all service, and it doesn’t sell plants, products, maintenance contracts, credit cards, cemetery plots or anything else.

“I’m just a lifelong gardening nut who enjoys helping people beautify their little corner of the Earth — without it driving them crazy or bankrupting them,” says George.

Services Offered

George offers both on-site rough sketches and detailed scale drawings on graph paper -- whichever helps you get the job done best.

• Helpful booklets. Every visit includes George’s 24-page “Yard-Care Survival Manual” (a “user’s guide” that covers all of the yard-care basics you’re somehow supposed to know but never learned in school), a 16-page “Yard Maintenance Schedule” (a month-by-month calendar telling you when to do what), and the 18-page “George’s Survivor Plants for Central Pa.” (a detailed listing of the best plants for our climate and soils).
• Plant care advice. Tips on fertilizing, pruning, watering, weed control, mulching and more.
• Landscape assessments. Which overgrown plants should come out? Which can be salvaged with a “haircut?” What’s missing? What’s out of whack? Would it be smarter to just move somewhere else?
• Ideas. What would look nice out front? What can you do about that sauerkraut factory you see out the back window? How can you develop a private area for relaxing after another day butting heads with the boss?
• Trouble-shooting and pests. Diagnosis of bug damage, disease, animal damage, environmental stress and assorted other horticultural mayhem… along with tips on what to do about it without poisoning yourself.
  

  George shows a client how to espalier a fruit tree.

• Plant selection. All plants are not created equal! Get good plants in the right spot and you’ll have very little trouble.
• Landscape drawings. If you’d like a scale drawing that shows exactly which plants to put where, George will take measurements and prepare graph-paper drawings. The drawing fee is $50 per hour, which kicks in after the initial 2-hour fee runs out.

Who could use a Garden House-Call?

• New homeowners who are starting a landscape from scratch and have no idea where to begin.
• People who have just moved and who need help identifying plants, assessing potential changes and learning how to care for what’s already there.
• First-time homeowners who need a one-time crash course on yard care.
• Current homeowners who want to spruce up the landscape, add new gardens or create something different than the same old azaleas, arborvitae and yews that everyone else has.
• Do-it-yourselfers who don’t mind doing the work but who need help avoiding lousy plants and getting the wrong things in the wrong place.
  

  A landscape plan George designed for a client.

Fees

A basic 2-hour visit is $150.
Additional on-site or drawing time is $50 per hour after the initial fee.
If you’re in central Pennsylvania and are interested in a Garden House-Call, call George at 717-737-8530 or email george@georgeweigel.net.