Do-It-All-Fridays

A recent plan for a client

Another day of estimating for one client, measuring for another, designing for another, and planning to meet with another. A new client was referred to us by his neighbor, a client for whom we recently installed a rain garden. It's great--their apartment complexes are right next to each other, giving the neighborhood a double dose of sustainable landscaping! Their projects are almost exactly the same in many ways: they have the same lot and building measurements, the same soil type (which is loamy!), and their downspouts (1 each) are located in the same location. So, it makes my job a lot easier, because I can use the same calculations for runoff water to design a similar rain garden, I can use a similar estimate, and I can use a similar plant palette to build consistency within the neighborhood.

Other fun Friday activities included making plant lists, communicating with clients, and working on the PPL project. The project we're doing for the non-profit Project for Pride in Living is an "Eco-Village" in North Minneapolis. The village will be a demonstration landscape used to educate the community about sustainable landscaping techniques, like rain gardens for stormwater management and windscreens for energy savings (see below).

University of Minnesota SULIS

We're installing the project next weekend, so I made a bunch of calls for donations. We're trying to get a tree nursery to donate a few evergreens and a tree care company to donate wood chips. After tons of calls, we still had no evergreens, but we were able to get 2 truckloads of free mulch delivered to the site by Asplundh!