BC Gardening -

Greg Johnson

TL;DR: After they rescheduled my appointment twice, I paid BC Gardening $550 to rototill my backyard and the final product was no different than before they began. My attempts to discuss the issue over phone and email have been met with an unprofessional silent treatment. I still wish to have a conversation, but I am now being ghosted. Please see the attached image of my emails for additional detail.

Please consider the many other gardener options available in the area before contacting this company. In my experience they perform the least amount of work possible, behave dismissively when questioned, and actively avoid open and fair discussion.

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After many attempts to resolve my concerns through in-person discussion, phone calls, and email, BC Gardening has chosen to give me the silent treatment rather than have a professional discussion about my concerns with work performed on my backyard on August 25th. I have hoped to resolve this without bringing online review sites like Yelp! and Google into the discussion, but this appears to be the only tool I have left to start a dialogue.

My original appointment was set for Monday August 24th at 9am. Just before the scheduled time was to begin, we received a text from BC Gardening letting us know that they would need to reschedule for another day due to work at another site going long. We requested for the work to be rescheduled for the next morening at 9:00am, but they instead gave a window of 9:30am to 10:30am. Instead of work beginning during this timeframe, we received yet another text saying that the equipment necessary for our job was left at another site and that they would be late. Due to appointments that day I allowed BC Gardening to begin work while I was gone, rather than rescheduling for a third time. It seems that they were at the site for no more than 1 hour.

Before work began, my lawn was essentially 1" or less of fresh topsoil placed on top of a rock-hard layer of clay. My expectation was that after rototilling the lawn would be a mixed-up layer of 4" - 6" of loose soil; this was not the case in my experience.

Because the post-work state of the lawn did not meet my expectation of what the results should have been, I reached out to BC Gardening and requested that they come by to discuss the work. The team returned promptly and explained that they had tilled the soil and that the current state was enough to plant grass. At this point I explained that the work contract was not to create "soil suitable for grass", but rather to have the soil rototilled. The crew explained that the large machine needed to perform any additional work had moved on to another work site. They proceeded to use the small tools to scalp the lawn, but this had no real impact on the soil depth. After more discussion with BC Gardening it was clear that they had done the work they intended to do and I was informed that if I wanted the soil tilled to the level I expected originally that they would need to schedule a new job to do so. I was hoping to put this situation behind me and paid the due bill on the contract, something I now deeply regret.

After two weeks or so I decided I wished to discuss my disappointment in the job further and attempted several phone calls to BC Gardening. The first few calls were met with a too-full voicemail box, but eventually I was able to reach them on the phone. On the phone it became immediately clear that my problems were not being heard and they wished to be done with the call. It was suggested that I send them an email to continue discussions. While on the phone, the owner mentioned they were at a site and busy so I requested a call after work, "any time between now and 10pm." No call came then or over the next 30 days. I sent three follow-up emails and tried call many times, all of which were ignored. I have attached an image of these emails to this review for the record. As I stated in the emails, through the phone calls, in person, and in this review,I wish to discuss the lack of improvement to my back yard, but have not found a means to do so.

Muhammad Rashid