Garden Maintenance in Mallorca

Growth here is front loaded. Almost everything moves between February and June, slows to a stop through the driest weeks of summer, then wakes again after the first serious autumn rain. A visit schedule copied from a northern contract spends money in August and misses the two windows that actually matter.

The other difference is irrigation. On most properties the watering system decides whether the garden survives an owner absence, so checking and adjusting it belongs inside maintenance rather than in a separate call out.

Ask any company quoting you how many visits it assumes and what happens between them. That number, more than the hourly rate, is what makes two maintenance prices different. If you want to judge a schedule before anyone quotes, how often a Mallorcan garden needs watering and what the winter jobs actually are cover most of it.

A shared garden in a residential community, a finca with two hectares of olives and a villa that stands empty for eight months are all called maintenance, and they are priced and staffed in completely different ways. A community contract is set by the administrator, runs on a fixed monthly fee and has to survive an owners’ meeting every year, so it wants a schedule that can be written down and checked. A finca is seasonal work in large volumes, with pruning, clearing and irrigation dominating the year. A holiday home is about the state of the garden on the day somebody arrives.

That is why the request form asks who the property is for. The companies on our list tend to specialise, and a firm that keeps forty community gardens tidy is rarely the right one for an olive grove. If you manage shared grounds, the community maintenance page sets out what those contracts usually contain. Finca owners and holiday lets have their own pages under fincas and rural estates and holiday homes.

Every quote you receive is built from the same handful of variables, whatever the headline figure says. The area under active care comes first, not the plot size: a hectare of finca with a small garden by the house costs less to keep than a quarter of that in lawn, hedging and pots. Visit frequency comes next, and how much of the year it covers. Then the jobs that need a machine or a second person, which means hedges above head height, palms, and anything that has to be carried off the property.

Irrigation is the variable most often left out of a first quote and added later. A garden with a working automatic system needs fewer visits than one watered by hand, so a company that inspects the controller before pricing is quoting the real garden. Water itself is billed by the municipality, not the gardener, but a schedule that gets the watering right in May and June is what keeps the summer bill down.

Where the property is matters too. Travel time is part of every visit, and a garden a long way from the company’s base pays for the road. For a rough idea of how these variables land before anyone visits, the cost guide gives typical ranges by garden size, and the pages under areas we cover say which companies work where.