Big hillside gardens, established exotics and gums all through the streets — Upwey makes plenty of garden waste, and Ross takes it away in trailer loads.
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 Upwey 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.
Exotic and native prunings from hillside gardens.
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.
Old gardens with decades of growth to haul away.
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.
Clearing the bark and leaf build-up by the house.
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.
Storm-dropped limbs loaded and hauled off.
Upwey stretches from the shops along the Burwood Highway up into the forest and down the other side toward the southern foothills. It has a mix of everything: old weatherboards with cottage gardens, 1970s brick homes on sloping blocks, and bushier properties that blend into the trees.
What they share is growth. Rhododendrons, camellias and hydrangeas planted generations ago have become small trees, while eucalypts and blackwoods keep shedding above them. Bulk green waste is a normal part of looking after an Upwey property, and Ross provides the green waste removal Upwey households use when the job is bigger than the bin.
A lot of Upwey gardens were planted by people who loved cool-climate exotics, and the ranges' rainfall has let those plants get enormous. Cutting a camellia hedge back to a manageable height or taking out a tired row of conifers can produce more material than people expect.
Ross takes woody prunings as thick as he can reasonably handle by hand, along with leaves, soft growth and weeds. If a job looks like more than one trailer load, he will tell you before starting.
Upwey is not one kind of block. Properties close to the station tend to be smaller and easier to reach, while the streets climbing into the forest have steep driveways and longer walks to the back yard. Further down the southern side there are larger, more open blocks with long grass.
Ross adjusts to each. Where the trailer can back up close, the job goes quickly. Where it can't, he carries. Either way, he cleans up the driveway and paths before leaving.
Upwey is in one of the highest-risk bushfire areas around Melbourne. Leaf litter, dry bark and dead shrubs close to the house are what embers catch in, so clearing a good gap around the home before summer is essential.
Ross loads up the bark, litter and dead shrubs you have gathered and takes everything away, so the fuel doesn't just move to another corner of the block.
Once the Fire Danger Period is declared for the Yarra Ranges, burning off is off the table and clean-up bookings stack up. Getting yours done in spring means you go into summer with the fuel already gone.
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.
