Ken’s Tree Service

We hired Ken in Feb of 2011– so he was back in business at that point. Extremely nice guy, very chatty, knew a lot about trees. We liked him a lot. We hired him to remove one fir tree and four overgrown privets that were the size of trees. His price was extremely reasonable (OK, he was downright cheap).
However, the day he arrived, he didn’t have his wood chipper! He said that the truck it was on was broken. I didn’t know what he was going to do with all the yard waste. He was unclear. It turns out that he left yard waste piles up and down my street! They were huge– I didn’t realize the full extent of what he had done until after he left.
After he left, my husband found all kinds of signs of shoddy work– broken statuary, a small Japanese maple destroyed by his team’s trampling, etc. My neighbor told me that she saw them just letting the large privets fall straight to the ground– no effort to gently bring them to the ground. We also found that his crew had drunk all the juice boxes we kept for the kids in an outside cooler.
The icing on the cake was when I called Ken to schedule the replanting. We had paid him to pick up some replacement trees for our yard. But when I phoned, he said that he had spent my money on another project and he didn’t have the money to go and pay for my trees. To his credit he was a) completely honest about what he had done a b) tried to make it up to me– If I bought the trees he would put them in for free. But at that point, my husband and I decided that we were just going to let it go. It wasn’t worth the few hundred dollars to continue working with Ken and straighten this mess out. We called our regular gardener/​landscaper (whom we love, but whom we didn’t give this job to in the first place because he doesn’t have a chipper – ! – ) to get the trees and put them in. We are now happy with our yard, and have made a point about not hiring anyone without checking Unilocal first.

Ken’s tree service was in the neighborhood and he gave me an excellant price to trim my front tree. The crew was professional and clean-​up was good.
I recently try to hire him again to trim a tree in my back yard. He was a no show on three different appointments for estimates. Said he was in the process of moving. I was disappointed because he did nothing to work around it, and left me hanging.
I would give him more stars based on his first service and less stars based on his second service, so I averaged it to two…
Update: He went out of business due to family life problems. Assited with the tree triming on the side. Service was so-​so and inexpensive.