Dudley Maynord started working in the lawn care business 22 years ago, and he hasn’t looked back.

“I’ve been doing this since I was 18,” he said. “I started out with a push lawnmower, a Walmart Weed Eater and a broom doing residential yards.”

Maynord said at the time he was doing yards in the mornings, delivering papers for the Vicksburg Evening Post in the afternoons and going back to working on yards in the evenings.

“Then it just kind of snowballed and turned into something I liked,” he said.

Maynord said he went back to college in his mid 20s and earned a degree in landscaping from Mississippi State.

“I’ve always just liked making stuff look pretty,” he said. “I like making it look nice.”

Maynord Landscaping Inc. employs 10 full-time employees and typically brings on four or five more seasonal employees as demands increase.

“It’s a full line, we do bed installation, irrigation, dirt work, site work, develop pieces of property, driveways, bulk heads and every kind of maintenance you can think of as far as grass trimming, hedge trimming,” he said. “We’re licensed in tree surgery. We know exactly how to trim trees and we also cut big trees down if someone wants one removed.”

Maynord said their biggest customer is the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center, which accounts for about 50 percent of their work.

“Those guys cut 200 acres a week at Waterways (ERDC) and they cut probably another 50 acres a week in Vicksburg,” he said. “Some weeks they’ll have a special thing and we’ll have to cut the whole place. The whole place is 300 acres.”

Maynord said the company has been working at ERDC since 2006 and the center keeps them busy during the winter when much of the residential work slows down.

The business is a family affair, Maynord said.

“Me and my wife have been doing this together forever,” he said. “She does all the bookkeeping and handling the money. She told me to make the money and she would spend it.”

Maynord said he oversees the landscaping, tree cutting and dirt work, which is about 35 percent of the business. His son Alex is over all of the grass cutting and maintenance, which accounts for the other 65 percent.

“He’s 23, and he’s been doing it with me since he was 12 years old,” he said. “He’s the next in line, so he’s going to take Dad’s spot.”

Alex Maynord said he enjoys working with his father and the rest of the men on their crew.

“Me and him are more like a team,” he said of his father. “We get along pretty good.”

Alex said he’s learned a lot from his father and he plans to follow in his footsteps and go to Mississippi State to get his degree in landscaping.

“It’s a family business, and I’m proud of it and where we’ve come,” he said. “It’s grown a lot.”