Garden maintenance rounds: plan them by season and area

Plan maintenance rounds around the gardening year, not week by week. List the tasks each season brings, book your regular clients' visits first on fixed area days, then open the remaining capacity for one-off jobs. Keep visit lengths realistic for each garden, leave room for weather, and adjust the rhythm when the season changes: frequent visits during the growing season, fewer and longer ones in autumn and winter.

Adapt it to your climate and your clients. The point is to know in advance which weeks will be full of short, frequent visits and which will leave room for bigger projects and design work.

Maintenance contracts are the backbone of a gardening business. At the start of each season, place your regular clients first: book their visits yourself from your calendar, on the day that matches their area, so they're never squeezed out by one-off requests. On Book, use a separate service for them, such as "Maintenance visit: regular clients", so they're easy to spot in your bookings list.

Book's repeat function creates weekly slots on the weekdays you choose until an end date. For a garden visited every week, that covers the season in one go. For a visit every other week or every month, book each date yourself; there's no fortnightly repeat.

Travel eats into a gardener's day, especially with a trailer. Group gardens by area and give each area its day: the north of town on Monday, the villages on Wednesday, and so on. Clients in that area book on that day, and your route stays short. Say in the service description which areas you cover on which days, or create one service per area if that's clearer for clients. If a client outside your areas asks, agree a day by phone and book it yourself.

A small lawn takes 30 minutes; a large garden with hedges takes half a day. Open slots at the length each type of visit needs, and let the booking note tell you the rest. Ask in the description for:

You receive an email for each new booking, with the note, so you can load the right tools the evening before.

Rain, frost or a heatwave can make a planned visit pointless or harmful to the lawn. When you have to move a visit, reschedule it from your bookings list and call or text the client, since Book doesn't email them when a booking changes. Leaving one half-day a week unopened gives you room to catch up after a rainy spell without pushing the whole round.

Once regulars are placed, open the remaining capacity for one-off jobs: a hedge before a family event, a clean-up before selling a house, autumn leaves. Keep them as separate services with their own lengths. When the round is full, simply don't open more slots; your page only offers what's left.

Book costs €5/month, everything included: unlimited bookings and services, no commission on your jobs and no contract. It doesn't take payments or send reminders; keep your usual invoicing.

At the end of each season, look back at your bookings list: which areas were full, which days ran over, which gardens always took longer than planned. Adjust the next season accordingly: a longer slot for the garden that always overran, an extra day in the busiest area, fewer one-off slots in the weeks that were too tight.

Winter is also the time to talk to regular clients about next year: changes in the garden, new beds, a hedge to replace. A short visit or call booked in January makes the spring round much easier to plan.