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    Wildflowers planted for £75 as council quotes £2k
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    Wildflowers planted for £75 as council quotes £2k

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    1. Pengdulo on

      “He said: “There’s a lot of work in planting wildflower seeds. They have to prepare the area.
      “Each area the council does needs two separate treatments of herbicide. Then the team have to return to rotavate the area and return again to spread the seeds.
      “Then they’d come back at agreed intervals to pull weeds up.
      “Clearly that’s a lot more work than just buying a seed spreader and spreading a few seeds on the ground. So it costs money.”
      ________
      This jobsworth really doesn’t get the concept of wild flowers does he..

    2. Wild_Cauliflower_970 on

      I love that the council’s defence is largely “we cost more because we make it hard work for no real reason”

    3. InspectorDull5915 on

      Short version,

      Doing something yourself is cheaper than paying someone else to do it.

    4. granite-barrel on

      Turns out you can do stuff cheaper when you don’t pay for labour. Or insurance. Or any of the many other costs associated with running a business.

      Moronic.

    5. marowitt on

      My mate Dave sells weed killer for a 500% mark up, we need to get that.

      Also my other mate Dave the 2nd does yard work for £1k an hour, we need to hire him. Mystery solved.

    7. Astriania on

      Yeah, if you don’t pay for labour (three people for an afternoon is already several hundred pounds), don’t do any preparation and don’t set aside any time/money/equipment for maintenance, you can do it much cheaper.

      If these guys are going to handle all that for free in future too then fair play to them – a bit of community engagement and volunteering to make the place nicer is a good thing.

    8. iamezekiel1_14 on

      Wonderful. Moronic political stunt (which isn’t comparing like for like) gets amplified by the BBC to take a shot at public services. Nice.

    9. gggggenegenie on

      I can guarantee they will not be back to tidy, weed, etc so ver the coming months.

    10. boldstrategy on

      Not saying it isn’t a large quote, also it is a quote.

      But people really seem to forget how much people cost when doing jobs. £75 wouldn’t even pay for a callout fee, you do it yourselves fantastic, but when you call a Mechanic for a £20 part and it costs you £400 there is a reason.

    11. jodrellbank_pants on

      Our council bought a seed spreader for wild flowers for 179k, it didn’t dig the soil it just spread them in a furrow strip something a couple of guys could have done.

      The next year its gone, it apparently was just an experiment to see if it was viable, if cost 210k plus in total.

      The machine has sat in a compound unused rusting.

    12. Catman9lives on

      Can’t wait for them to be charged with illegal dumping and sent a bill for rectification works.

    13. OliverE36 on

      Meh, I see it from both sides.

      There is obviously more to it than just spreading the seeds and leaving it. This plot will probably be short through with weeds come next year.

      However £2000 seems excessive but I don’t know what the individual plot size is.

      I’m a farmer in the SFI, and the gov are willing to pay around £700 / ha for you taking land out of production and planting wildflower seeds. This price is primarily set in accordance with the average profit you would get from growing common arable crops on the land instead of wildflowers. The actual cost of establishing them are less than £700.

      However this can be done at home on your property and dosen’t require driving around the local country finding random plots of land to maintain / drill like the councils plots. Let’s assume this would make it twice as expensive and being the cost up to £1400/ ha (assuming the wildflower plots are 1 ha – in the pictures they look much smaller than that, and for £75 of seed I doubt they could be any larger than 0.5ha). But being kind to the council the max this should cost is £1400 imo. Probably much less than that.

    14. Weird-Statistician on

      That’s 2 people for a whole week plus a few seeds. Public sector madness. It’s easy to spend money when your “business” doesn’t have to generate it through sales.

    15. Optimism_Deficit on

      Three amateurs.giving up their own time to do the job for free are cheaper than a team of professionals who expect to be paid because that’s their livelihood?

      No shit sherlock.

      Spare room needs doing? Turns out buying a few tins of dulux and a roller is cheaper than hiring a painter and decorator, too. I’m a money saving genius me.