Small Landscape Projects

Over the years, some of the most fun landscape projects for our crew to install have been small projects, two to four days long, that have made a dramatic improvement in the appearance and use of an area for the homeowner.  We get a kick out of their excitement and pleasure at having “turned a sow’s ear (a sad landscape) into a silk purse.”

Our crew recently replaced an old, narrow, cracked concrete front entrance walk, probably poured in the 1950’s.   The homeowner loved the lushness and shape of a mountain hemlock growing over the sidewalk, forcing guests to walk single file to the front door.  We poured the new sidewalk wider and in a much larger arc to give the mountain hemlock room to spread.  We added brick expansion joints to dress up the appearance.  Two days is all it took.  “Why did we wait so long?”

In June we had a customer,  a single woman, who wasn’t sure she was going to stay in her house, so didn’t want to spend a lot of money.  Her back yard, in an earlier life, had been a collector’s garden with lots of small sitting areas, meandering paths of many different materials, a waterfall and pond, irregular lawn areas, and lots of specimen plants. When our customer purchased the house, the small back yard was a jungle, completely hiding the house from the neighbors.  She had had a friend do some of the major pruning and clean-up.  But she wanted to simplify it visually and have larger, more useful spaces that were easier to maintain.  We gathered all the pavers from the small patios and paths to nowhere to create a patio that would accommodate furniture and 6-8 people.  We took out the defunct water feature and redid the lawn in a large, curvilinear shape.  We transplanted some of her specimen plants into the newly shaped beds and mulched the beds with groco to give the whole landscape a finished look.  Four days and voila, a lovely back yard.

In May we were approached by a family whose garden designer suggested raised vegetable beds in place of a lawn area where their young son loved to play.  They had actually tried to grow a few tomatoes against the garage foundation at the top of an ugly rockery.  Could we make that west-facing area into a terraced vegetable garden and keep the lawn at the bottom?  The basalt rocks were huge, but we repositioned them with our Kubota backhoe to create two 3’ high x 25’ long terraces and filled them with garden topsoil.  On the top terrace, we added an 18” high x 2’ wide raised bed against the unsightly foundation.  We built the wall using flat-faced Cottagestone blocks with a cap on top.  The last time I saw it, there were tomatoes and peppers planted in the raised bed, and zucchini, carrots, onions, bush beans, beets, and basil planted on the terraces.  I suggested planting strawberries in the pockets between the large rocks.  Next year.