A job that kind of defined my life: Working in landscaping

Published on HivePostify by @beelzebubba · Sat Aug 08 2026

Like a lot of teenagers I went to school not really having an objective other than doing well enough to not get in trouble at home and get the job done so that I could do other things.

When we start to get closer to our senior and last year of high school the questions start to pop up about what we would like to do with our lives and most of the people that I knew didn't really have any idea. I think this is a lot of pressure to put on a teenager and only a select few have any real idea about what they would truly like to do with their lives. For me, I didn't really have any idea and sometimes that people that would visit our high school were just there to make sales for their particular private college. I admit that I was kind of enamored with a lot of what these sales representatives would do and I don't like that this is (or at least was) as part of high school. Kids shouldn't be subjected to sales representatives stopping by with their overpriced college plans and promises of financial aid that ends up crippling a lot of young adults after they recklessly borrow $100,000 towards a degree that they are not truly interested in, and also doesn't really have a job path for it.

But one summer I got introduced to a job that kind of opened my eyes to what I really would like to do and it kind of helped to shape my future. I finally did have a plan of sorts because of working in this field even if it was just for a few months.

[src](https://www.younghouselove.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ep49-irrigation-john-working-650x867.jpg)

My parents never forced me to get a job but we did have an understanding that if I didn't put in some work myself, that I was not going to get a lot of handouts from them. If I wanted to buy stuff, I had to work for my own money. Previously, they had helped me get my own lawnmowers and I made quite a lot of money in this independently. Later on, my Dad spoke to a friend who owned a company called Lawn Doctor and it was a turf-management, landscaping, and irrigation system company. It wasn't a huge operation but I was going to get paid $10 an hour which at that time in the early 90's was a really good wage. I also didn't need to concern myself with doing any of the advertising and I don't remember why, but I wasn't really all that interested in updating my own lawn mowing equipment which at that time was coming up on 10 years old.

I didn't really have much of an idea about what I was getting myself into, but it was during that summer that I started to appreciate the simple yet gratifying nature of working with your hands outdoors.

A lot of the work was considerably more complicated than just cutting the grass although that was a large part of what we did. I enjoyed the installation of irrigation systems the most because there is a real science to it and you can't just do it any ol' way. There is only so much water pressure that each area of the system can support so there was some math involved and you had to be careful about how you installed each of the zones. If you put too many sprinklers on one circuit, there wouldn't be enough water pressure to make them work. If you put too few of them, you are making the entire process of watering the yard take a lot longer than it should.

The systems that we installed mostly operated on electronic timers so that the homeowner didn't even need to be actively involved in the process.

[src](https://santabarbaraca.gov/sites/default/files/styles/mediumnoncrop/public/images/canto/Rain%20Sensor.JPG.webp?itok=U9qmA1a2)

One of the really cool things we installed was something called a rain sensor. This would detect how much natural rainfall had happened in the past 24 hours and if there was already a certain amount it wouldn't turn on the sprinklers until there was a need.

We also installed some dubiously legal pipes that would pull water from a nearby stream or river. I never understood why, but you were not legally allowed to take this water. We would covertly install a long pipe underground to the river and conceal it a foot or so below the surface so that it wouldn't be detected. I think maybe this period of time is when I started to have a general distrust of the government. They don't want you to take the water that is naturally there and free, they want you to pay for the water they supply instead.

I don't want to go down that rabbit hole right now but I will save that for another day.

When I worked these sometimes quite long days I realized that I had a great deal of admiration for my boss and how he owned all of this. He was providing a service at a fair price and mostly he got new customers by word of mouth. People would see how wonderful the customer's yard looked and they now would know that they could have it as well, as long as they were willing to pay for it. There was no tricky salesman tricks here, there were not ripoffs. It was just a small team of people that were providing something that people need at a fair price. We also had specialized equipment that an individual wouldn't have much reason to own on their own and this equipment was often quite expensive.

[src](https://cougarsalesrental.com/cdn/shop/products/c30xa700x700.png?v=1597945980)

One of these pieces of equipment was called a Ditch Witch and it is a rather unstoppable trencher that would dig lines in the soil at a specific depth that was perfect for laying the PVC pipes for the irrigation systems. I LOVED using this powerful piece of equipment and it was also a good intro into how dangerous this sort of thing could be. It would slice a person clean in half like you weren't even there if used incorrectly. It also would destroy anything in its path including municipal electric and water lines, so we had to get city schematics about the location of said pipes before we made the digs.

The best thing about this job as opposed to my restaurant jobs was that we knew, for the most part, exactly what we were getting ourselves into for the day. There was never a surprise rush of customers that would make our day stressful. We had a plan, we knew approximately how long it would take and we would work until a certain level of that project was done each day. Upon leaving the site we would have a meeting about the plan for the next day and would wake up and do it all again.

Normally we would work 6 days a week and while a lot of other kids were just lounging away, I was making around $100 a day. This was an absolutely massive amount of money for a teenager and I don't mind telling you that my wages were not reported to the government so I didn't pay any taxes.

It was during this summer of my Sophomore year of high school that I all of a sudden figured out what I wanted to do. I hadn't yet determined if I would need to go to college for this or not and I wasn't dead set on landscaping being the primary focus or not. I did know at this point that I wanted to be my own boss like Marvin, the owner of Lawn Doctor, was though.

This would end up evolving at time went by but I am quite grateful that my Dad organized that summer job for me. Had he not, I probably would have been like a majority of my classmates: Just kind of going through the motions and ending up in some liberal-arts sort of program at a state school.