Give me a home among the gum trees, with a Par-3?

When Orange City Life last spoke with local lawn care YouTuber Ben Sims in 2019 his passion for a great-looking lawn was just a handy little side hustle. Now with over 125,000 subscribers, it’s become a full-time business that has taken him on an international tour and seen him embark on an ambitious project in his new backyard.

“I’ve got too many plans,” laughs Ben, standing on the sweeping lawn of his home a few minutes' drive east of Orange.

Ben and his wife bought the small acreage in July last year. He said it is something they had always wanted for their young family, but it’s also the perfect canvas for his growing business.

“My wife and I always wanted to move out of town, but the main reason was for the business, to expand it,” says Ben, who left his job as a greenkeeper at the former Bloomfield golf course to go full-time into business for himself in late 2019.

The main source of his income is online sales of lawn care products through his website, where he sells everything from fertilisers, herbicides, and wetting agents to lawn aerators, spraying equipment and his own branded merchandise.

And his sales are driven through his ever-growing hours of instructional videos on his Lawn Tips YouTube channel, where he gives advice on how to get the best out of your lawn.

“I never thought selling fertilisers would be my main gig but here we are,” laughs Ben, who says the irony is he first became a greenkeeper because he realised he wasn’t cut out for a sales job. 

“My brother is working at the golf course and I wanted to get out of working at the phone shop, '' he explains. “I wasn't into sales… which is funny now that I'm doing sales all the time. but it's not my cup of tea, selling stuff.”

Working with grass on the golf course, Ben became obsessed with learning more about it and soon turned to YouTube as an outlet to share what he knew.

“When I started doing projects at home and on the golf course, I just continuously kept talking about it to my wife and obviously she wasn't very interested!

“So I thought I need to tell someone about this. It excites me enough, so I thought why not start shooting some videos teaching people how to look after their grass and it just exploded from there.”

In 2020, it even landed Ben a paid trip to the United States, where he filmed videos with other lawncare YouTubers.

“What a funny experience! Sponsors paid for the whole trip… it was a good experience and it was just right before COVID, so good timing,” he says.

“But by the end of it I was stuffed because I went to four different states talking to guys about grass — you'd never think talking about grass would get you a trip over to the States, but it did!”

Now with a lot more room to play with, Ben has embarked on an ambitious project for his Youtube channel; building his own Par-3 golf hole in the paddock next to his home.

“It has been a ridiculous amount of work and it will be ongoing! I think I'll need to get an apprentice just to keep up with it all,” says Ben, who has been busy shaping the green this past week.

“It will be a Par-3 with a green, three tee boxes, two fairways and water feature… there's a lot of work involved just moving dirt, installing irrigation and shaping fairways, shaping greens, doing drainage…

“And that's just the prep, then it comes to putting your turf down, and looking after your turf, watering it, keeping it healthy — it is an ongoing process, so it will take me a while to get it going and then the rain has also been a big factor as well.”

Each step of the whole process is, of course, filmed and uploaded so Ben’s subscribers can follow along and maybe learn a few things along the way.

“People grab onto the story; starting to construct a bit of a golf course sparks people's interest,” says Ben, who is already working on ideas for future projects to film

“I have another paddock over there and I will do a few trial plots and eventually another golf hole, but it really depends on how things go with this and how much water we've got.

“Then I've got the backyard,” he continues. “I'll get some different grass types back there and might get some robot mowers and show them off, maybe a little pitch and putt for the kids, show how to grow grass under trees….  there are lots of different things to do once everything is all up and running.”

While the larger block has brought with it added costs in fuel and many hours of (unfilmed) maintenance to take care of, Ben wouldn’t have it any other way.

“100 per cent, I wouldn't change a thing! I'd do it for the rest of my life – well I will be until I retire and then I probably will keep doing it, because I love filming, uploading things and chatting to people online, it's like a little community. I love it.”

You can find Ben’s videos @LawnTips on YouTube, follow him on Facebook and Instagram or visit his website www.lawntips.net