Landscaping & Exterior Services in Somerville, MA
Somerville is the most densely populated city in New England, and every exterior job here is a consequence of that one fact.
It means the yards are small — often a strip beside the driveway and a patch out back that three households share. It means there is nowhere to park, nowhere to stage material and nowhere to put debris, so anything that comes out of your yard leaves in our truck the same day. And it means the distance between your project and the next person's window is measured in feet, which changes what is reasonable to build and what time it is reasonable to start.
What that produces is a specific kind of work: small, precise, and done inside a tight window by a crew that planned the logistics before it arrived rather than after. We have worked this city since 2005. Somerville does not reward contractors who improvise.
A Somerville Job, Start to Finish
On a street with no parking and a four-foot side yard, the order of operations is the whole job.
- 1 The walk-through is about access Where can a truck stop, for how long, and how does material get from it to the back? On a lot in Spring Hill or East Somerville the answer is often a narrow side path and a gate that has to come off its hinges. That is fine — it just has to be known before the number is written, because carrying everything by hand is most of the labor on a small build.
- 2 We book the smallest vehicle that can do it A full-size dump trailer on a Somerville side street is a bad idea that ends with a crew moving it every fifteen minutes. We would rather run a smaller truck and take more trips. It costs us more and it means the job actually happens on the day we said it would happen.
- 3 Material comes in the amount the site can hold There is no driveway here to drop six yards of stone onto. Deliveries get staged in what the yard can physically take, which sometimes means a second drop mid-job. A contractor who does not plan that in Somerville is planning to leave a pile on the sidewalk, which is a call to the city waiting to happen.
- 4 It is clean before we leave, every day Your neighbors are living inside the work site — that is what density means. Nothing gets left overnight on the street, the sidewalk goes back to being a sidewalk at the end of each day, and the debris leaves with us rather than accumulating for a Friday haul.
Small-Space Gardening, Done Properly
A Somerville yard is not a small suburban yard. It is a different problem. Sixteen by twenty feet, shaded on two sides by triple-deckers, with soil compacted by a century of use and a decent chance of construction fill somewhere in it. The instinct is to treat it as a tiny lawn. That almost never works — the light is not there and the foot traffic is too concentrated for turf to ever recover from it.
What does work is building up rather than out. Raised beds and containers give you soil you actually control instead of whatever happens to be under there. Vertical structure — a trellis, a fence line planted properly — makes a small yard feel like a room rather than a leftover. And a paver patio in the right place turns twenty square feet of struggling grass into the part of the property people actually use, which in a city this dense is worth more than a lawn was ever going to be.
The neighborhoods differ more than outsiders think. Davis and Teele have more room to work with than Union Square and East Somerville do. The blocks along the Green Line extension have been through years of construction and their yards show it. Assembly Square is a different world again — newer, more commercial, and far more likely to need a grounds contract than a garden design. We price them by what is actually in front of us.
When There Is No Curb Left
Two Somerville problems have the same root: there is no spare space anywhere. In autumn, a full cleanup on a lot this size produces more material than any curbside program was designed for, and thirty bags on a Somerville sidewalk is not a look — it is an obstruction. So we haul everything out. Massachusetts bans yard waste from landfill, so it goes to an organics route regardless of who moves it.
The other is mattresses. Somerville turns over constantly, and since November 2022 Massachusetts has banned mattresses from disposal entirely. Leaving one on the sidewalk here is not a solution — it just makes it somebody's problem, and usually that somebody is the property owner. We collect on a booked date and dismantle to Massachusetts state standards, with the steel, foam, fiber and timber separated and recycled. It is the same operation the City of Boston approved as a BPDA mattress recycling vendor.
- Standard mattress pickup: $79.95 — booked to a date, put it out the night before
- Expedited next-business-day pickup: $119.95, which is what the end of August is for
- One item = one mattress or one box spring — a set is two items
- All cleanup debris hauled out the same day — nothing staged on your street. (508) 271-5655
Where We Work in Somerville
What We Do in Somerville
Somerville — Common Questions
There is nowhere to park on my street. How does that work?
It is the first thing we plan rather than the first thing we discover. We run the smallest truck that can do the job, we stage early, and where a job needs street space for a day we deal with the permit instead of hoping. In the densest city in New England the difference between a good contractor and a bad one is mostly whether they thought about the truck before they arrived.
My back yard is twenty feet square and gets no sun. Is it hopeless?
No, but it is not a lawn. Between the triple-deckers, most Somerville back yards get two or three hours of direct light, which turf cannot live on. Raised beds, containers with soil you control, a patio where the grass keeps failing, and shade planting along the fence line — that is a yard that works. Sod in that spot is money you get to spend twice.
Can you do the cleanup without leaving bags on the sidewalk?
It is the only way we do it here. There is no curb space in Somerville to stage thirty bags for a week, and a pile on the sidewalk is an obstruction before it is an eyesore. Everything leaves in the truck on the day the crew is there. Yard waste is banned from landfill in Massachusetts, so it goes to an organics route either way.
The Green Line extension construction wrecked my yard. Can it be fixed?
Usually. What we mostly see on those blocks is compaction — soil that has had heavy traffic over it and has no structure left, which is why nothing you plant takes hold. That is fixable, but not by throwing seed at it. The compaction has to be dealt with and real soil brought back before anything is going to hold. We will tell you which of the two problems you actually have.
Serving Somerville Since 2005
Free on-site estimate anywhere in Somerville. Call (508) 271-5655 or request one online.