Entries for February 2010

Professional landscape services are more popular than ever. With the huge building boom in recent years in New Jersey, two income families and the outdoor living craze. It is easy to understand why. Many people have come to realize the value of professional landscape services in their property values and life styles.

The result is the tremendous growth of the landscape industry in New Jersey.

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If you take a close look at the majority of landscapes installed in New Jersey you may start to notice a pattern. What you will notice is your eye jum...

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The wave of phone calls to my office usually starts during the first warm week of March. Virtually all these prospective clients are astounded to hear we are booked for the next 8 to 10 weeks.

I often relate to friends that owning a landscape firm in spring is like owning a toy store at Christmas time.

There are more similarities than you may think but the main one is people get caught up in the spirit and often make poor choices they must pay for later. 



The problem is you need to plan a little more ahead than March or April. Anyone from New Jersey knows if you want to rent a nice house down the shore you reserve it in January if not a whole year before!

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Over the years I have been blamed for a lot of things in my career as a landscape professional. From broken gate latches to damaged light fixtures it seems the landscape contractor is automatically guilty. Now don’t get me wrong sometimes we inadvertently will cause some damage while performing our services but my observation has been to blame us first without any consideration of other factors.
 

Let's take the broken gate latch for our first example.

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Shade can seem a daunting place to have any plausible lawn or gardens. In most situations you will be able to achieve measurable success with proper preparation, selections, and care.

The most important thing before you start on your shade area project is to realize that for any level of success you must give the same level of importance to each of those three issues. Think of it as a three legged stool. If you remove one leg it will fall.
 

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The deer population in New Jersey has reached epidemic proportions. Most of our rural suburban and even urban communities have some level of deer pressure.

Beyond damaging millions of dollars in landscape plantings they are also damaging agricultural crops, horticultural crops, and our natural woodlands.

While our politicians wrestle with how to handle this issue we are left to fend for ourselves with our landscapes and gardens.

The first lesson in deer resistant plant selections is that nothing is deer proof!

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Many people are shocked to find out that a large percentage of what a design/build professional does is re-design and re-build others peoples landscape projects. Some are thirty to fifty years old and must be upgraded. But many are often less than ten years old. These newer projects are the lion’s share of what my company re-designs and build. Why rip out and re-do landscaping that is so new?

The reasons are many but often it was poor planning, cost cutting, and “cutting corners”.

 

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