Daniel Lake unstrapped his harness and eased the 20-pound leaf blower off his back.
He was done after eight hours of listening to the machine's whirring motor and smelling gasoline. His job that day was to blast leaves from a tangle of English ivy.
"It'd be really cool to have a landscaping business where everything was done by hand," Lake said to his boss before heading home.
"It would take forever," his boss said, laughing. "That's a crazy idea."
During his hourlong drive home to the Cleveland, Ohio, neighborhood of Tremont, Lake thought about how hard it would be to lug commercial equipment into the postage stamp-size yards in his neighborhood. Yet he saw a market for landscaping in Tremont and many other urban neighborhoods where people take as much pride in the appearance of their homes as do suburbanites. With growing national concern for sustaining the environment, Lake figured there could be demand for a pollution-free landscaping business.
He quickly told his girlfriend, Allison Hurley, about the idea.
"Why couldn't we do this on our own?" he said.
Combined, he and Hurley had the expertise that could make the business a success. Lake had more than a decade of experience as a professional landscaper and had also worked as a tool-and-die maker. He met Hurley, who has a degree in biology, years earlier while working in horticulture at the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo. She knew her landscaping and had a good understanding of native species and how ecosystems work.
Hurley was instantly sold on the business idea. On that fall evening in 2004, she said to Lake, "What have we got to lose?"
The following spring, the couple began canvassing the neighborhood for their first customers. They promoted a landscaping company, now called Simple Yard Care, that uses only manual tools -- such as rakes and push mowers -- and organic fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides. Rather than use a truck to carry equipment and debris, they pull trailers on their bikes.
Three years later, Lake and Hurley are now looking to hire more people.
"We've had people choose us because there aren't too many landscapers in the area, and there aren't too many that service little urban yards," Hurley said. "For such a small yard the choice is really between us and a guy who might be out of work. That's really our only competition."
Anita Cook and her husband, Tom, moved from Solon to Tre- mont a year and a half ago because they were interested in city living.
They were used to having landscapers take care of the large lawn at their old house, and didn't even have a lawn mower to take care of their tiny new plot.
While at a local coffee shop, they spotted Lake and Hurley on their bikes pulling landscaping equipment. The Cooks asked the couple to stop by and give them an estimate on maintaining their yard. They've been customers ever since.
"I love the fact that they live in my neighborhood and I'm supporting their business" Anita Cook said.
Greg Spangler, another Tre- mont customer, said he and his wife, Anna, had planned to take care of the yard themselves when they moved in four years ago. But the fast-growing bamboo, wisteria and ivy in the back yard proved too much to handle.
"We've learned a lot from Allison and Daniel," Spangler said. "They've made a lot of suggestions and have been very helpful in helping us select what to plant, where to put it and how to take care of it."
Hurley said she and Lake encourage people to select plants that are native to the region and that work well with the ecosystem here.
"I think with us you get a little more of a big-picture outlook on things," she said. Her background in biology helped her understand how organisms are interconnected.
For example, she knows which bacteria attack certain shrubs, and which ones can be used as substitutes for chemical herbicides.
Hurley got into landscaping at the zoo because she thought it could lead to another job working with animals.
"The more I worked in the department, the more it kind of grew on me," she said. "The more I realized you can't have animals and you can't have life if you don't have plants."
With Simple Yard Care, Hurley has taken on the role of lead designer.
"Usually when I design a yard, I try to account for some kind of wildlife attracter," she said. "Right here in Tremont, we're right off the lake, there's a river right here, I think it's a perfect place to reintroduce these plants and attract birds back into the neighborhood."
Lake is more engineering-minded. He's good at determining how water drainage should work and keeping the team's lawn equipment and bicycles intact.
Leonard Axelband, a counselor for the Service Corps of Retired Executives who has worked with Hurley and Lake, said he was impressed that they've been able to keep their prices competitive, despite doing jobs in a more labor-intensive way. SCORE is a resource of the U.S. Small Business Administration that offers free business counseling.
Lake said Simple Yard Care can keep its prices fairly low because the company doesn't have the expenses of power equipment and gasoline that typical landscapers do.
"For the past three years we've been proving that it can be done," he said. Now he and Hurley are working to expand. They plan to hire additional employees this year and, once they're trained, put them in charge of running Simple Yard Care hubs in other urban neighborhoods in and around Cleveland.
Of course, those employees will have to be committed to the company's strict ethical standards.
Among them, it refuses to plant invasive species - like English ivy.