Mountain ash bark, tree fern fronds and fallen limbs gathered up, carried up the slope and taken away — for Belgrave blocks where the forest comes right to the back door.
Not a franchisee or a truck driver from a booking system. The bloke who quotes it is the bloke who loads it.
No bags to fill, no skip to load. Leave it in a pile and he loads it, sweeps up and takes it away.
Not a bin size. A heap beside the driveway and one at the bottom of a steep yard are different jobs and get different prices.
Standing tree, asbestos, or more rubbish than garden — he tells you before he starts, not after.
A pruning pile hauled away and a few bags of leaf litter collected is the usual combination on a Belgrave block.
Piles of prunings, branches, hedge trimmings, leaves and weeds that won't fit in the green bin. Ross backs the trailer in, loads it himself and takes it away to be recycled — you don't lift a thing.
Fern fronds, ivy and bark from forest-edge yards.
Doing a big garden clean-up — overgrown beds, a back corner nobody has touched in years, a rental between tenants or a property being tidied for sale? Pile it all up and Ross collects the lot in one visit.
Terraced gardens stepping down the hillside.
Fallen limbs, shed bark, leaf litter and dry prunings gathered up from around the house — the fine fuel that matters most in a grassfire or ember attack. Collected and taken away before the Fire Danger Period starts.
Litter collected from around timber decks and walls.
A gum has dropped a limb across the driveway, or a windy night has left the yard covered. Ross collects what's come down and hauls it away. Standing trees and hung-up limbs are an arborist's job — once they've dropped it, Ross can take it away.
Limbs down after a wet, windy night in the ranges.
Belgrave is the end of the train line and the start of the forest. Houses sit on narrow benches cut into the slope, the tall trees lean over the roofs, and the yards stay damp and green for most of the year. It is beautiful country to live in, and it grows garden waste faster than almost anywhere else around Melbourne.
Between the bark the big eucalypts drop, the tree ferns shedding fronds, blackberry and ivy creeping in from the gullies, and the sheer amount of shrubbery on a typical block, a single green bin is a token effort. Ross does the bigger green waste removal Belgrave properties need: he loads the pile by hand and takes it for disposal at a green waste facility where it gets mulched.
Most Belgrave gardens are more understorey than lawn. Ferns, pittosporum, holly and hydrangeas planted decades ago have grown into thickets, and the canopy above keeps dropping into them. When people finally get stuck in, the result is usually a mountain of mixed material rather than a neat pile of clippings.
That mix is fine. Ross takes soft green stuff, woody prunings, bark strips and weed pulls in the same load, as long as it is organic. Pulling out environmental weeds like ivy or blackberry is worth doing here, and getting the waste off the property stops it resprouting in a compost heap.
Getting a trailer close is the main challenge in Belgrave. Plenty of houses are reached by timber steps down from the road, driveways are steep and short, and the street itself might be a narrow bend with nowhere wide to pull over.
Ross works with it. He parks where it is safe and legal, then carries the load up to the trailer. Tell him how many steps there are and roughly how far the pile is from the road, and include a photo if you can — it makes the quote accurate the first time.
The Dandenong Ranges carry some of the highest bushfire risk anywhere near Melbourne, and Belgrave sits in the thick of it. The dangerous material around a house is the fine, dry stuff: bark heaped against a wall, leaves in the gutters and under the deck, and old pruning piles that have dried out over summer.
Clearing that fuel away before the CFA declares the Fire Danger Period is the sensible move. A fire season clean-up with Ross means the litter, dead growth and pruning heaps leave the block entirely rather than sitting in a corner waiting for a spark.
The Fire Danger Period in the Yarra Ranges usually arrives as the weather warms up, and after that everybody in the hills wants their clean-up done at once. Book in spring while the ground is still soft and the diary still has room.
Suburb, roughly how much there is, and what the access is like. A photo saves a lot of back and forth.
Ross comes back with a number. On big or awkward jobs he has a look first rather than guessing.
Loaded by hand, driveway swept, and off for proper green waste disposal.
Ross runs this on his own. He quotes the job, he turns up, he loads the trailer and he takes it away — the same bloke every visit. There is no office in between, no skip company, and no franchise cut coming out of what you pay.
It also means he will tell you when something isn't his job — a standing tree that needs an arborist, or a pile that is more rubbish than garden — rather than taking the money and leaving you with half a problem.
The suburb, roughly how much there is, and how easy it is to get a trailer to it is enough to work with. A photo of the pile gets you a price fastest.
Prefer to talk? Call or text Ross on 0416 030 925. Monday to Saturday, daylight hours — weather permitting.
Get a price on your pile. Takes a minute — Ross reads them himself.
Thanks — that's gone through to Ross. Spring is his busiest time, so if it's close to fire season he may take a day or two.
