Garden trade: from grandma's street to the stadiumGA

GA1: the ladder and rounds

The garden trade climbs four tiers, the shape every trade shares (EC9). Each client has a tier, a district, a size class and a round frequency in data.

Rounds (tier 2)

• A regular is on a round: a fixed weekday, weekly or fortnightly. The round fills the calendar on its own; regrowth since the last visit sets the work (a weekly lawn is a quick, satisfying tidy; a skipped week is heavy). How a client comes to ask for a round, or how you pitch one, is WK5.
• Missing a visit: a polite call, then a warning, then the client leaves (and may tell the street). economy.md's "never game over" still holds.
• Rain: moving a visit for rain is free (weather.md). Rain stops mowing (wet clumps, scalping on soft ground: GR2), and shady lawns stay wet until nearly noon (DY3), so a shady client is an afternoon visit.
• Season contracts: estates sign one ($400-1,500 a week): mow + edges + hedges + lawn health (GA2), a visit or two a week.

Needs: EC1 (prices), EC3 (a registered company for tier 2 money) · Done when: a weekly regular appears every week on its weekday and leaves after missed visits.

GA2: lawn health, weeds, scarifying, aerating, overseeding

The farming layer: the client's lawn is your crop. A lawn you care for gets visibly better week after week, and contract clients pay for that (satisfaction, price, referrals).

Lawn health

• Each client garden keeps a few numbers, seen on the job sheet and in the grass itself: weeds (dandelions, clover patches), thatch (spongy, dull), bare patches and colour (feed).
• They drift day by day: weeds spread, rain feeds growth, mowing too low hurts. Lawn health growth follows weather.md's growth (rain speeds it, the endless late spring ×1.2). Treatments fix them.
• What the drift should feel like: mowing alone keeps the lawn short, but weeds still spread and thatch builds up, so the client's mood slowly sinks. Mowing plus treatments (spray in week 2, scarify and overseed in weeks 2-3) looks worse for a week, then the lawn turns round and the client renews the season contract. Two skipped weeks and the lawn goes wild; the client calls, warns, then leaves (GA1).
• Thatch and moss fill their rows in the mower's grass-condition table (GR2): the mower feels the lawn's health. GR2's site map says where damp shade grows moss.

The treatments

Pricing every new task

Each task is priced like everything else: work minutes × district rate + materials at cost + 20% (an honest trade markup, shown on the quote; economy.md EC1). The same rule prices GA3, GA4 and GA5.

Licences

Bought on the computer (My Company), each with a fee and a reputation minimum; the numbers are tuned in economy.md EC5. The lawn treatment licence (~$300, reputation after registering) opens weed control and weed & feed. The chainsaw certificate is GA4's; liability insurance is insurance.md's.

The hire desk and the machines

Big machines can be hired at Barrow & Bolt's hire desk (per day) before you buy them, so a job is never blocked by capital ("not frustrating"); buying pays off once you do the task often. The hire desk opens here with the scarifier and the aerator; the others join it with their ideas.

Needs: EC1, GA1, GR2 · Done when: a client's weedy lawn is visibly better after three weekly visits with treatments.

GA3: beds and planting

Priced as in GA2. The tools are the rake, the half-moon edger and the wheelbarrow (GA2's machine table).

Needs: EC1 · Done when: a client's bed is weeded by hand (a snapped root is back on the next visit), edged and mulched from counted barrow loads, and the plants set out to the client's sketch have grown by the next visit.

GA4: trees and stumps

Priced as in GA2.

The chainsaw certificate (~$250) is a licence like GA2's: a one-day course, and the day passes (for all the siblings who take it).

Needs: EC1 · Done when: with the chainsaw certificate, a small tree felled with a notch and a back cut lands in its drop zone (a wrong cut lands on the fence and is billed at cost), its branches go through the chipper as mulch, and the stump grinder takes the stump below ground.

GA5: new lawns

Priced as in GA2.

• New-build estates (tier 2-3 clients): bare earth plots.
• Sowing: rake level (a rake pass like trimming), spread seed, roll, water. It grows over days, with a paid check-up visit. Rain helps; a dry week needs watering visits.
• Turf laying: carry rolls from the pallet, lay them in rows with staggered joints (a placement puzzle: gaps show), cut the edges, roll. An instant lawn, and expensive (turf ~$5/m² at cost). Turf needs watering in a dry spell.
• New turf and new seed fill their row in GR2's grass-condition table (first cut high only, soft ground ruts, a scalp kills it).

Needs: EC1, GA1 · Done when: a new-build plot sown and rolled grows into a lawn over the following days (a dry week needs a watering visit), and turf laid with staggered joints shows no gaps while badly laid turf shows them.

GA6: patterns and the big walk-behinds

Stripe patterns are requested and scored, growing from rich estates to the stadium.

• Patterns use what mowing already stores: each cell's mowing direction (MO1's lawn memory; GR1 draws the stripes from it, and patterns come out crisp).
• A request names a pattern; the score compares the lawn's direction field with it: straightness (wobbly lines), even width (a stripe = the deck's width), coverage (no missed cells), crisp ends (turning on the headland).
• Patterns: plain stripes, checkerboard (two passes crossing), diamonds (two diagonal passes), wide/narrow stripes, circles (estates' show-offs), the club crest (stadium, the endgame flex: a mowing-direction stencil).
• Tools matter: a roller mower (the Regent 53 striper) lays deep stripes that last days; a plain rotary's fade far sooner (GR1 owns the band life). The cylinder mower lays the best stripes and the lowest cut.
• Tier 2: a pattern request is optional (a bonus + a tip). Tier 4: it's the job (GA8).
• Example requests: Mrs. Whitmore (leafy avenues), "Proper stripes this time, dear. Straight ones." (+$40 bonus, a tip likely); Lady Mossley (the hills), a checkerboard over the whole lawn for the garden party (+$120 bonus).

Needs: GR1, GA1 · Done when: an estate's checkerboard request is scored on straightness, even width, coverage and crisp ends from the lawn's direction field, a wobbly lawn scores lower than a straight one, and a roller's stripes still show on the next visit when a rotary's are gone.