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The autumn calendar of a garden suburb
Most of Sydney gets a mild disappointment in May. Ku-ring-gai gets a season.
The liquidambars, pin oaks and maples that line these streets were planted a century ago by people homesick for a real autumn, and every year they deliver one. This is what that means if you own a garden here, month by working month.
Late April to June: the fall itself
The first cold snap after Anzac Day starts it, and for six weeks the canopy comes down. A single mature liquidambar drops far more than one green bin cycles in the same period, and the leaves don't wait their turn: they bury lawns, fill box gutters, and pile against every fence line on the ridge. Raked and left, they compact into a slick mat that shades the lawn out underneath.
Our work in these weeks is volume: the raked mountains, the gutter-clean bags, the season's first "the whole back corner, please". Loose leaves can't be bundled to council green-waste rules, which is why this is the season people first discover the gap between what a garden produces and what the kerbside system accepts.
July to August: hedge season
Winter is when the big structural cuts happen, hedges reduced while growth is slow, deciduous trees shaped while you can see their bones. It's the smart time to do it, and it produces the year's woodiest piles: photinia limbs, murraya bulk, the crab-apple that got two metres taken off. Woody prunings stack better than leaf but weigh more than they look, and this is the season our saws earn their keep cutting drag-piles into carry-piles.
September to November: the southerlies and the spring overhaul
Spring here arrives with wind. The southerly busters that end each warm spell test every old limb on the ridge, and the morning after a big one, half the street has a branch across the lawn. Storm work for us is garden recovery: the drop cut up and gone, the lawn raked back, the bed it crushed given a fighting chance. At the same time the spring overhauls start, the veggie beds rebuilt, the turf lifted, the garden readied for the entertaining season, each one generating its own honest trailer-and-a-half.
December to March: the quiet accumulation
Summer is when the back corner does its quiet work. Clippings go over the fence line "for now", the Christmas clear-out boxes reach the shed "for now", and the subtropical downpours, this ridge catches over 1,200mm of rain a year, keep everything growing hard. By March, "for now" has become the pile you stop seeing. It's also our best season for shed and under-house clear-outs: the garden asks less, so the other understorey gets its turn.
If you only book us once a year, book us for the fortnight after the leaves finish falling. The garden's whole year goes better from a clean floor.
The practical takeaway
Plan the big garden work for winter, expect the fall to beat your bins in May, and treat every southerly as an appointment-maker. And whatever the season: the council's booked green-waste collections (four a year, three cubic metres, bundled, their rules here) are the free first resort, and we're the crew for everything they can't reach.