The Silent Gardener

When Sheldon Rideout started gardening for a living more than 35 years ago, the soundtrack was a wall of engine noise. Today, the company he founded doesn’t own a single gas-powered machine.

The aptly-named Silent Gardener, a Vancouver-area landscaping business, maintains strata properties, commercial sites, parks and school board grounds. Its vehicles and equipment are all electric.

“We don’t have anything that runs on gas,” Rideout said.

Determined to avoid the noise and pollution of using gas-powered equipment, Rideout began The Silent Gardener more than 27 years ago using no power tools at all. But three-acre sites became too much for a push reel mower, so he began buying commercial electric equipment as it appeared, such as a zero-turn mower with a 60-inch deck and a 22-kilowatt battery.

The vehicles came later. Around 2021 or 2022, the company acquired two 2012 Ford Transit Connect vans fitted with electric drivetrains by Azure Dynamics out of the University of British Columbia. Rideout said only about 500 were built, and he managed to find two. In around 2023, the company bought its first full-size Ford E-Transit.

The fleet now also includes four Ford Lightning pickups for towing trailers. Two low-speed vehicles, both bought at auction, handle smaller downtown sites.

The vehicles and equipment charge at a locker in Vancouver, where the company has an agreement to run a Level 2 charger, or at Rideout’s New Westminster home, which has three chargers. One crew working in remote areas relies mainly on fast chargers.

The savings are significant, Rideout said. His home power bill, which covers eight electric vehicles including personal ones, runs about $700 every two months.

“It’s your typical EV thing,” he said. “Your maintenance costs go away, your fuel costs go away.”

“There’s also no spending time in the morning with crews filling up at gas stations.”

Low-speed vehicles are the company’s next focus. Rideout said he has about $24,000 invested in his CanEV unit, and he is about to buy another. A new, all-electric pickup, by comparison, starts upwards of $70,000.

Rideout said the biggest obstacle to electrifying was never technical. Equipment was scarce early on, but that has changed. “It’s not as hard as everybody thinks. You just have to be more creative,” he said. The real challenge, he said, is “getting past people’s mindsets. You can do it the way we do it.”

Electric equipment has also opened doors for the business. Rideout said the company would never have landed its school board contract without it.

His advocacy has taken him well beyond B.C. Rideout has appeared on podcasts and YouTube channels to talk about battery technology. And each fall, when gas-powered leaf blowers draw noise complaints, local media call him to explain the problem.