Warranwood's quiet courts and bushy gardens drop a steady stream of bark, sticks and leaves. Ross clears the pile and takes it for recycling.
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 Warranwood 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.
Native garden prunings from quiet courts.
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.
Gardens planted in the 80s and 90s, now fully grown.
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 and bark cleared near reserve boundaries.
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.
Gum branches down after a gusty night.
Warranwood is one of the newer parts of Maroondah, built out mostly through the 1980s and 1990s among the remnant bush on the city's north-eastern edge. The streets are quiet courts and crescents, the houses are family homes on reasonable blocks, and many properties still have tall eucalypts that pre-date the estate. Warranwood Reserve adds a big patch of bushland right in the middle of it.
The gardens planted when these houses were new have now had thirty-odd years to grow. Screening shrubs are huge, natives have got woody, and the gums keep shedding. A green waste pickup every few months is how a lot of Warranwood households keep on top of it without living at the tip.
The plantings in many Warranwood front yards were chosen when the house was built — bottlebrush, grevillea, lilly pilly screens, a couple of silver birches. They were small then. Now the lilly pillies are over the gutter line and the bottlebrush has taken over the path.
Getting those back under control is heavy going, and the cut material is bulky. Ross can take care of the lot once it's cut, or come out after you've spent a weekend on it and clear what's left.
Properties close to Warranwood Reserve and the other bush pockets get more leaf and bark fall than streets further in, and they are closer to the kind of vegetation that burns. Keeping the fine material cleared away from decks, fences and sheds is sensible housekeeping before summer.
Ross doesn't touch the reserve itself — that's council land — but he'll collect the green waste on your side of the fence and take it away for proper green waste disposal.
Courts are easy for parking, and most Warranwood jobs have good trailer access out the front. The harder part is usually getting material out of a back yard past a narrow side path or a pool fence.
Point it out when you book and send a photo of the route. It helps Ross allow the right amount of time and keeps the price accurate.
By late spring the gums around Warranwood are dropping bark and the grass is drying off. That's when it pays to get the loose material cleared from around the house. Leave it until the new year and the job gets bigger, drier and harder to book.
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.
