How long garden jobs take

Routine maintenance

Mowing scales with area. A lawn up to 25 square metres takes under an hour, 25 to 75 square metres one to two hours, 75 to 150 square metres two to three hours and 150 to 300 square metres three to five. A first cut on grass left to grow runs to three to five hours whatever the size, because the clippings have to be collected in stages.

Machine choice moves those numbers a long way. A domestic walk-behind mower covers around 1,350 square metres an hour of actual cutting, a professional 53cm machine nearer 1,850, and an 80cm ride-on close to 5,760. Set up, edging and clearing typically take as long again as the cutting itself, which is why a timed job of 77 minutes mowing filled 128 minutes on site.

Hedges, trees and clearance

Hedge cutting runs one to two hours below a metre, two to three hours between one and two metres, three to five hours between two and three metres, and half a day to a full day above that. No published figure exists for minutes per linear metre, because height and depth change the face area far more than length does.

Tree work has clearer bands. Felling a small tree under eight metres takes half a day, a medium one a full day, a large one two days and a very large specimen up to five. Grinding a single stump takes 30 minutes to two hours, stretching towards a day on the largest. Garden clearance runs from a few hours on a small plot to one or two days where the growth is heavy.

Hard landscaping

A 20 square metre patio takes around three days including excavation, sub-base, laying and pointing, with a small terrace of 10 square metres closer to two days and anything over 40 square metres four to five. Published guides disagree here, with the same source quoting both two and three days on different pages, so the ground condition is what settles it.

Fencing moves faster. Six panels across 11 metres is a day's work, twelve panels across 22 metres is two days, and an experienced two person team fits ten to fifteen panels a day in good conditions. Concrete posts set the pace, because postcrete needs time before panels can be dropped in. Decking runs two to four days, artificial turf one to two, and a pond one to five.

Turf and planting

Turf timings vary by a factor of three across published sources. One cost guide gives three days for 100 square metres at 30 to 35 square metres laid per day; working landscapers and turf growers describe 100 square metres, or 100 rolls, as a day's work. The difference is ground preparation. Laying onto ground already levelled and raked is a day; excavating, removing spoil, importing topsoil and consolidating takes two or three.

Border planting has no published duration at all, and is priced by the day or by the square metre instead. Plan on half a day to a day for a modest border once plants are on site, and remember that the watering that follows matters more to the outcome than the speed of the planting.

Design and build projects

On-site time and elapsed time are two different things. Design work takes two to four weeks, and a trade body puts twenty hours or more into visualising a scheme and producing a scale drawing. Build phases run two to four weeks for a mid-size garden and six weeks or more for a large one.

Elapsed time is longer because of waiting. Contractors in demand quote three to six months for a small project, six to nine for a medium one and nine to eighteen for anything complex, and most of that is the queue, planning permissions and material lead times rather than work on the ground. Booking in autumn for a spring start is the pattern that avoids the worst of it.