Free garden calculators

All five are free, need no sign-up and run in your browser. Each one answers a quantity question: how many pavers, how many plants, how many square metres of lawn, how many bags of compost, how many litres a week. Get the quantity right and you stop buying twice, which is where most of the waste on a small garden job actually happens.

An estimate is not a quote

Where a calculator shows a cost it gives a range, and the range is deliberately wide. Four things move a real price and none of them can be guessed from a square metre figure: access to the site, what is under the ground once it is opened, how much spoil has to leave, and how far off level the area starts. A courtyard reached through a house and a driveway a bakkie can reverse onto are not the same job at the same rate.

So use these to plan and to budget, and to check that a quote you have been given is in the right part of the field. For a figure that does not move, we measure on site and the visit is free.

Measure the thing you are changing

The commonest input error is measuring the whole area instead of the part being worked on. People measure the full boundary for a hedge that only needs to screen one neighbour, or the whole garden for a lawn going into one section. It is nearly always smaller than it looks from the back door, and it is worth walking out with a tape before you type anything in.

The numbers behind these come from the same guides: spacing centres in the hedge calculator are taken straight from the table in the hedges guide so the two cannot drift apart.