Checking a photo costs you nothing. When it turns out to be knotweed, we come and survey it, set out the options for spraying or digging it out, and write the report your lender or solicitor needs to see. Surveys from £275.
Most of the plants people photograph for us are not knotweed at all.
Snap one leaf, a bit of stem and the whole plant if you can. We answer without sending a bill. We only suggest a visit when it really is knotweed, and you see the price in writing before anything is booked.
The canes die back and turn brown from October, and the border looks tidy. Below ground the rhizome carries on. Come the spring it returns wider than before.
Inside every survey:
Things we do not charge for:
Reports follow RICS guidance on Japanese knotweed and residential property. Take it to any contractor you like.
Cleared mill sites, infill plots between the terraces and older rented streets are where a stand gets expensive. We survey the ground, draft the method statement and carry out the spraying or excavation.
A spraying programme over a few seasons if you have the time, a dig-out if you do not, and buried membrane where the stand is on land you cannot reach. Every load of waste leaves with the right transfer paperwork.
Most calls from Bolton start with one of these situations.
Gardens that back onto an old canal line, a rail embankment or the Croal and Irwell valleys are the ones that meet knotweed most. A survey shows how far it has come over the boundary.
Pink spears with curled leaves pushing out beside a garage, shed or gatepost from April are what most people notice first.
The TA6 form asks about knotweed outright. Getting a plan together before listing is far less stressful than scrambling once a valuer has mentioned it.
A foundation trench cut through a stand can drag rhizome across the whole plot. Have it dealt with before the builder turns up.
Often from a void house, a rental or a cleared mill site. What you need is a dated record of where it is and when you raised it.
Shoots forcing through slabs, tarmac or a block-paved drive hint at rhizome underneath. Plot it before anyone relays the surface.
Bolton grew on cotton. Hundreds of mills and their chimneys once lined the Croal and the Irwell, rows of terraces packed in around them, and when the mills closed many sites were knocked flat, filled and left to scrub or built over. Add the old canal, the railway embankments, the 1930s estates pushed out onto the hillsides and the damp edge of the moors, and you get plenty of ground where knotweed can take hold unseen.
A survey shows whether it started in your garden or has crossed from the plot beyond the fence.
One leaf and a stretch of stem is enough. Use the contact form or message us. It costs nothing.
If it is knotweed, we visit, measure the stand and note what is close to it.
A programme across several seasons, or digging it out when the date will not move.
A written plan for you and your lender, then return visits until nothing regrows.
Send a photo through the contact page or give us a ring. Knotweed or not, you get a straight answer and no invoice.
Addresses across BL1 to BL6, plus Bromley Cross (BL7), covering the town centre and every district out to the moors and the Wigan and Salford borders. We work out of Bolton, so a visit anywhere in the borough can normally be booked inside the same week.
Sending a photo is free. The report belongs to you. We agree the price before we lift a spade or a sprayer.
Knotweed on building plots