A little loving for your landscaping

It’s roasting like Riyadh, muggier than Manila and the rain only seems to arrive via a tropical storm wind that also has a thing for snapping trees and yanking down power lines.  Not exactly the time of the year when you’re just dying to get outside and toil on your little patch of heaven.  But the fall planting season isn’t far off so you might be starting to think about a plan for your next round of landscaping.  If so, here are a couple of local resources we’ve used that might be of use.

Garden/Landscape Design – 10 years ago when we moved in, the “landscape” at our place consisted of a chain link fence, bamboo running wild and nary a square foot of garden bed or patio.   At the time it felt like we’d never get the place turned around.  Since then we’ve engineered a pretty good turnaround.  The trick for us was coming up with a long term design early on that we could then follow at our own pace, chipping away at it each season as time/resources allowed.  Along the way we’ve evolved the design a fair bit to incorporate new needs (addition, tree house one year, arbor the next, patio, etc.).  But having a main rudder for the effort has really helped, not only in getting a result that hangs together, but also in having specs for the various providers (garden centers like Merrifield, landscapers, etc.) we’ve used to help us implement the vision.

Our design resource was Pamela Underhill.  She crafted a starting plan for us and has since updated it 2-3 times.  What we liked?  She’s local, knows what works here/doesn’t, and has good tips for trades/plant providers, etc in this area.  We’ve consistently liked her ideas and built our own tweaks from them.  Her prices are reasonable and she’s always been happy to work with us on these smaller bits rather than a big single job.  Small nit, sometimes the turnaround has been a little slow but that probably comes with the relatively small size of our asks.

Landscaping and Maintenance -   For several years now we’ve worked with Community Landscaping.  Mike Balog runs the outfit which seems to do a lot of work around here.  Generally I’ve found Mike to be very responsive, reasonably priced and fair.  They’ve done several patio/paver projects for us, along with a few bed cutting and clean up jobs.  Quality has been pretty solid and where it hasn’t been up to snuff on a first attempt, Mike’s crew has been quick to get it fixed.  They’ve also taken good ownership for the various projects they’ve done for us over the years.  So if last year’s effort needs a quick tune up in a spot, Mike just does it, no new charges, etc.

We’ve also used the Greener Side, run by Aaron Gorski.  Aaron did some sod for us after our addition, put in a dry well to deal with runoff and completed some limited stone work.  Similar experience for us as above, generally solid results from an easy to work with local provider.  We stopped using them after some slow response on getting a bid a few years back but assuming that can be chalked up to growing pains, Greener Side is also an option to consider.

As with so many parts of the home ownership adventure, we’ll never really be “done” with the landscaping I suppose, but every year we get a little further along and get a result we love a little more.  If you’re undertaking a similar journey at your castle, these local resources are worth looking up.