One dad decided to turn his lifelong hobby into a bit of a side hustle last summer and now rakes in over £2,000 a month from it.
Nathanial, 29, from Kingston Upon Thames, always loved gardening and would often spend his spare time planting flowers, growing vegetables and tending to weeds in his garden at home.
Last year, the father of six, whose day job is construction and electrics, wanted to change his working hours so he could spend more time with his family and make a bit of extra cash over the summer months.
So, Nathaniel decided to make use of his gardening skills and created an account on Airtasker.
Airtasker is an app and website which allows people to outsource their everyday tasks such as furniture assembly, CV writing, graphic design, gardening and decorating.
People usually publish their task, and the app’s community members then bid on it with the winning bid getting the job.
Nathanial told the Mirror: "My mum had bought a lawnmower and asked me to do the garden so I helped her out, and I thought my mum needed some help other people will need some too.
"So she let me borrow her lawn mower and I started off offering to cut people's grass, and from there I got myself a hedge cutter and started using that."
At first, Nathaniel was only taking in around £100 a week as he was only working smaller jobs worth between £20 to £40.
He added: "It's because I didn't have loads of good reviews to start off with but when they came in it got better."
After around two weeks, the side hustle became to gain some speed and he began to pick up bigger and better-paid gardening work.
He said: "It was obvious then to me, this could be a long term thing."
Currently, Nathaniel picks up between four and 12 different gardening jobs a week which usually consist of mowing, weeding, hedge trimming, and pressure washing decking, to even bigger jobs such as full garden clear-ups.
He said: "The large clean up jobs bring in the most money for me, these can range from £100 up to £350 for a couple of hours work, sometimes it's for like two and a half hours and that's my day's work done."
Nathaniel does often take on a few Airtasker jobs saying that he recently almost "burnt out" because he took on three jobs a day, each day for around two weeks.
He added: "I was waking up at 7:30 in the morning, getting the kids up dropping them at school and going straight to the first job.
"Id usually finish that by around midday, and then finish that around 1:30pm, and then onto the next one which finished around 3pm-3:30pm, and then home and spend the evening with my family and I'd do it all again the next day."
For the busier weeks, Nathaniel can take in as much as £750 a week, over the last year the most Nathaniel has brought in from his Airtasker jobs was around £3,500 a month.
With the money he makes, Nathaniel has managed to make some investment into his side hustle which has helped him get bigger and better paid work on Airtasker.
He now owns an electric trimmer, a pressure washer, a petrol-powered lawn mower, and a leaf blower.
The money Nathaniel makes through these jobs is not taxed, which means he has to declare it to HMRC through self-assessment tax returns - Airtasker also charges a service fee on jobs depending on the tasker's "tier" on the platform.
For anyone wanting to do something similar, Nathaniel's advice is to find something you enjoy doing, see if you have a skill that is attached to it and to just "give it a go".
According to research by Airtasker, over the next year, the top home improvements the British public are looking into doing include painting and decorating (54%), decluttering (39%), DIY (38%), cleaning outdoors / gardening (3%) and 28% landscaping (28%)
Even though Nathaniel makes a good amount each month through his work, he said it was never about the money for him.
He explained: "Yes the money I make is cool, but it was never about the money for me, It was all about getting to be able to spend time with my family.
"My only regret is that I didn't start this sooner."
