Maintenance Gardening & Harvesting Packages

While some people love getting their hands dirty maintaining their garden and harvesting their produce themselves, we recognize that others don’t have the time or the inclination.

We provide detailed instructions and training for those who want to care for gardens themselves and also offer several maintenance options in which we provide ongoing care for your edible and ornamental garden, and/or harvest your produce for you on a regular basis. You could come home each week to a basket of freshly harvested fruits, vegetables and flowers on your doorstep!

Whichever maintenance option you choose, your garden will look beautiful and will produce delicious organic food for you and your family. As you begin to eat straight from your garden, you will feel more and more confident in your relationship with the plants and garden ecosystem that are producing your healthy organic foods.

Ornamental & Edible Garden Maintenance Program Options

Maintenance gardening and harvesting rates start at $40/hr. We offer the following three garden maintenance programs:

Maintenance Program A: Bi-weekly (that is twice a month) basic organic garden maintenance visits. This organic service focuses on ornamental plants, lawn and general garden cleanup -- in Oakland, Berkeley and the surrounding area -- at our basic rate of $40/hr. We cover the basics -- but with a very high quality, organic service; after each of our visits, your garden will look fresh and fabulous, ready for you to enjoy it!

If you live in the South Bay (Palo Alto or San Jose area) we highly recommend you consider getting help with your weekly garden maintenance from the fabulous group at TeamWorks -- a wonderful worker-owned green landscape maintenance cooperative we collaborate with regularly.

Maintenance Program B: Seasonal/quarterly garden maintenance visits.  Depending on the season, these visits will focus on major winter pruning and cleanup, seasonal bed refreshing, organic fertilizing, new plantings and cleanup -- with a special focus on edibles, ie refreshing of organic planting beds, seasonal re-plantings of annual edibles, fruit tree pruning and specialized fertilizing, ie for blueberries and citrus. Small design projects can also be accomplished during these visits. This service is at our specialized service rate of $50 per hour. 

Clients will have the flexibility to hire us for one seasonal visit or all four depending on their garden's needs. Regardless of how you choose to have your garden cared for on an ongoing basis, we'd love the opportunity to help you with your seasonal garden maintenance, especially winter pruning and seasonal edible plantings.  Especially if you live outside of the immediate East Bay area, this is where our expert horticultural and organic farming knowledge really is of great value to you! We can prepare and amend the soil for planting, select the varietals that will do best in your garden and plant your annual edibles properly in the ground. In the winter, we'll take care of the corrective pruning and shaping that will keep your perennial flowers, shrubs and trees in best health and appearance. Our expertise means that your plants will avoid infectious diseases and won't have so many woody, unattractive limbs.

Maintenance Program C: Garden coaching on a regular basis, working alongside our clients to care for their gardens. Our garden coaching approach helps our clients learn how to maintain their edible and ornamental gardens, with the aim that, over time, clients will be growing edibles and caring for their perennial ornamental plantings largely on their own, with occasional extra help from us in the form of seasonal maintenance visits. Garden Coaching is at our specialized service rate of $65/hr.

Sharing your Surplus with the Community

Clients often find that their gardens produce more food than they can consume; we encourage them to give away extra fruit and veggies to friends and neighbors. If you prefer, your garden surplus can be donated to a local food bank of your choice or to one of our favorite local non-profits, for example City Slickers Farm or Funk Town Farm.

If you’re interested in our maintenance services, you can contact the Star Apple team at inquiries@StarAppleEdibleGardens.com or just give us a call at 510 922 1258.