Most garden jobs are fine to take on yourself over a weekend.

A smaller group involve real risk, kit you’d have to hire, or groundwork that has to be right first time, and those tend to cost more to put right than to hand over.

Deciding what to buy in comes down to how much can go wrong, what the job needs in the way of equipment, and how costly the fix is if it fails.

This post may contain affiliate links. This means if you buy something after clicking on a link, I’ll earn a few pennies to help me keep creating posts like this, at no extra cost to you!

A steep-looking quote often looks reasonable against the cost of doing the work twice.

6 garden jobs worth paying someone else to do

Tree work at height

Pruning a mature tree involves a chainsaw, a rope and judgement about which limbs hold the crown together. Whoever you use should carry public liability insurance, and it helps to know that a tree surgeon and an arborist aren’t quite the same thing, since an arborist is trained in tree health rather than only in cutting. Check whether the tree is protected before any work is booked.

Laying a patio or replacing tired paving

Slabs are the part you see, but the depth of the sub-base underneath decides whether the surface stays level. Poor preparation usually shows within two winters, as frost lifts the bedding and joints open along the edges. Quotes for landscaping in the West Midlands vary a fair bit for the same area of paving, and the difference tends to sit in the groundwork rather than the stone, so ask what depth of hardcore each price includes.

Fence posts & boundaries

Panels are simple to fit, but posts are where these jobs fail, because anything not set deep enough or concreted properly leans after one winter of gales. Boundary work involves your neighbour too, so it helps to use someone who checks which side owns the fence and works to a line both households accept.

Levelling a lawn that’s gone lumpy

Topping up small hollows with soil and reseeding is a job for a spare afternoon. A lawn that pools water or has drifted out of level across the whole garden is a different matter, since the turf has to come up and drainage often needs sorting first. Judging falls by eye is hard, and a crew with a mini digger turns weeks of weekends into two days.

Reducing a large hedge

Taking two metres off an overgrown conifer hedge is less about the cutting than what follows, because the debris fills a van and the cut face has to be shaped so it grows back evenly. With nesting season running from February to early August, a heavy reduction is better booked for autumn. Someone doing this weekly will also know whether the hedge can regrow from bare wood.

Clearing an overgrown garden

Clearing heavy overgrowth is mainly a disposal problem, since the cutting goes quickly and getting rid of the results doesn’t. Anyone taking green waste away needs to be a registered waste carrier, and it’s reasonable to ask for the number, because fly-tipped rubbish gets traced back to whoever it came from.

Working out what to pay for gets easier once you separate the jobs you’d enjoy from the ones that simply need doing properly. Get two or three quotes for anything involving groundwork, check what materials and waste removal are covered, then keep your weekends for the planting.

This is a collaborative post.