Anticipating the coming season...

It's been a quiet couple of months in Halifax and I can't wait to get back out of the house into the fresh air and do some gardening. I've had my usual six week break over the winter and now I'm practically climbing the walls. With almost no work coming in, except for a little bit of tidying up after some builders ruined the front garden of one of my clients, I'm getting impatient to pick up my regular clients once again. I'm still ambivalent about builders; while I should loathe them for their cavalier attitude to the garden,trampling through borders and across the lawn with gay abandon, I still have to thank them for creating work for me which wouldn't otherwise be there. It saddens me when I see the destruction they have caused but I know that with a little bit of time, hard work and faith in nature's ability to bounce back, everything will come good and by the end of the Autumn, all the mess will be long forgotten. Having tried to work around one set of builders last year, I have a sneaking suspicion that one of my other main clients is going to decide to get on with the building work which they have vaguely threatened for the last 3 years...Turning my thoughts to the coming season, I'm interested to see how the effects of the recession and growing unemployment change the profile of the gardening and landscaping business. Just having done a Yell.com search for gardeners in Halifax, I noticed that I am now the only gardener paying for a priority listing through Yell.com (last year there were three). There are a total of 27 businesses listed under garden services in Halifax so it's going to be interesting to see how that progresses over the coming year. A part of me wonders whether we'll see a little blip in the number of gardening companies starting up this year - people taking their redundancy packages and setting themselves up a little gardening business. I'm not sure whether this will be a good or bad thing for the industry. My fear is that people will think that gardening is an easy job to do, with little learning - a job that pretty much anyone can do. While gardening is a job that pretty much anyone can do to a certain extent, it's not one that you can just go into with no preparation and expect to succeed. It has taken me four years to build up a good but small round of clients who I work for regularly. If I get one large client a year, I think I'm probably doing OK. This year, if I get one large client I think I'll be doing exceptionally well. I don't know if we will see any new businesses start up but I wouldn't be surprised. I think the current climate will be one of mere survival until things settle down a bit.Well, I don't want to end this blog on a down note so I'll try to think of something more upbeat to cheer myself and my readers up. Although it all seems doom and gloom at the moment, I know that Spring is only a crocus or two away. There are all those mad tulips and daffodils to look forward to, all that manure and compost that will need digging in once the snow has gone,and before you know it, you'll have a to-do list as long as your arm. As soon as the bulbs start flowering, we'll be headlong into the inexorable growing season and hardly have a chance to catch all those favourite flowers. Remember the smell of those first Spring days? They're not all that far away now.

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