Spokane and the Beauty of Spring Drainage

Landscaping and hardscaping in the Spokane, Washington region is a little different than you might expect from Washington State. We don’t get the rainfall of cities like Seattle. On the other hand, we do get snow. This means that our landscaping projects (and yours) have to be ready to deal with a big spring melt – lots of water at once, instead of drips and drops throughout the year. Proper drainage is the key. This is especially important with hardscapes, where the water travels along a stone or concrete surface before it hits the dirt.

Drainage can go wrong in a whole bunch of ways, but in many cases we can divide them into two basic categories. First, you get insufficient drainage when water pools and collects where it shouldn’t. If this happens on a hardscape it will eventually wreck the stone or concrete you used. This may take some time, but when it does, the material is often expensive to replace. If it was bearing a load, that creates a whole new set of problems.

Poor drainage can quickly destroy soft landscaping features by ripping soil out, drowning grass and creating impromptu muddy pools. Sometimes this is easy to see, as you see a torrent of water snake down during the first major thaw. Watch out, though: Other instances can be hard to identify. In these cases, soil erosion sneaks up on you. If you finished a landscape with rolls of sod, the water can well up underneath, loosening it. You’ll find out when great chunks of grass die, or float away during the first heavy storm.

Less well-known is the problem of excess drainage. Yes, you can have too much of a good thing, especially in dry seasons where every drop of water counts. This problem comes from a combination of deep slopes and sandy or rocky soil. This can also happen when a hardscape directs all of the runoff away from your green space. Excess drainage dries out the soil over time, killing plants and turning dirt into dust.

The best way to fix poor drainage is to get a professional to check the slope and runoff on your landscape. He’ll sculpt the land to direct water into a natural drainage area, or build a drainage area for you. In many cases, we use crushed rock to let runoff drop back into the water table without pooling in the surrounding soul. If excess drainage is the culprit, retaining walls can reduce the slope, and new soil can absorb water more readily. No matter your problem, contact us for drainage landscaping jobs in the Spokane area and we’ll be able to keep the water from bothering you.

Half of Landscaping is Cleaning Up

It’s true. Landscaping is messy work. There’s a lot of digging and dirt. Sometimes you have to use big machines. Sometimes, when you need your garden at its greenest, you even need to handle a bucket of crap (fertilizer!).

That’s why one sign of a skilled landscaping company is the ability to perform a thorough cleanup of the site. Over the years, we’ve gotten this down to an efficient routine, to the point where we now offer landscaping site cleanup as a separate service. You should consider hiring a professional for this in a whole bunch of circumstances. These include:

Heavy Landscaping Materials or Other Stuff: Extra rocks don’t just roll away by themselves. If you’re doing landscaping yourself, you’re often in a bit of a bind. If you use a short estimate on materials it may force you to take another trip to the landscaping materials yard. If you overestimate, you’ll have to move the excess. While people are usually only too happy to reclaim unused materials, some of this stuff is difficult to move, and if you do it wrong, may wreck the earth, especially when you’re talking about big boulders. This holds true for some pre-existing features too, such as rocks from other projects and tree stumps.

You Screwed Up Your Own Landscaping: I hate to say it, but some of our jobs are “911 calls.” People get into landscaping with a lot of enthusiasm, but soon discover they’re not the types to figure it out from books and TV shows. In this case, professional help lets you finish the job and get rid of materials you don’t need in one go. Now the question of whether you screwed up is subjective in some cases (though it’s obvious when you mess up a water feature, because that just gets messy). To know for sure ask yourself useful questions, like “Do my guests come inside even when I’m having a backyard barbeque? Do my kids weep when I ask them out to play catch? Are the curtains always closed? Has by significant other made a joke about my landscaping skills recently?” These will reveal the truth.

It’s Time to Sell Your House: If you’re about to sell your house, consider getting a professional to do a thorough cleanup and perform minor fixes to your existing landscape. Most people attend to the yard last, and at best, just get their own stuff off the lawn. The fact is that many of the broken down gardens and crumbling retaining walls you see in any home for sale could be easily fixed and add thousands of dollars in value to the property.

If you fit in one of these categories and live near Spokane, give us a shout!

All about Shale

When most people think of shale they immediately envision the gray, thin layers of shoreline rock by a lake or river. It’s beautiful, but it doesn’t always go with local homes and the surrounding landscape. That’s a huge misconception. The truth is that shale has an incredible amount of variety, and you can usually find a type to match your project.

Shale’s variety comes from its origins. Shale is what is called a clastic rock. That means that it’s composed of other minerals that have cemented together due to natural forces. Shale is a clastic sediment – it’s made of bits of other broken rock. Shale comes in many, many colors because it’s composed of the materials that eroded and cemented in a particular region. It shares this origin with sandstone, but unlike it, shale is finer-grained.

People often worry that because shale really is made of particles of other stones it will rapidly erode in damp weather. Part of the misconception comes from the fact that most shale comes from watersheds where the elements have already left noticeable wear. Shale strength and texture is based on how old it is. Younger shale hasn’t been exposed to as much heat and pressure, so it’s coarse and not as firmly cemented.

Keep in mind, however, that all shale took millions of years to reach its present form. It didn’t get smoothed out right away. If you want your garden path to outlast all of recorded human history, maybe you have cause to worry, but most of us have far more modest goals!

Want to give shale a try? Start with our Wood Stone. You can use it as a wood substitute because thanks to shale’s properties, it absorbs water in much the same fashion as wood. If you like it, see if you’d like to build it into a Water Feature - Our Specialty.

Attention Spokane Landscapers: Your Driftwood is Here!

That's right: We've got Driftwood for Landscaping available at our Landscaping Materials Yard. If you're in decent driving distance of the Spokane, WA area come by and see if our stumps will fit your landscaping projects. Driftwood is a great material for landscaping for a whole bunch of reasons. Here are just three of them:

It's Unique: Pretty much the best thing about driftwood is that no two pieces are alike. You can get stone in regular blocks or standard tiles and let's face it, one wood chip looks pretty much like another, but as driftwood is grown and never cut into regular shapes, it's as distinctive as the tree it came from. Driftwood also comes in a whole bunch of colors, from deep brown to bleached white, so no matter the shape, you can find a piece to match your landscaping plans. And unlike other materials, you can carve driftwood to create the shape you want.

It's Light: Earth, stone and tile or brick are your basic landscaping materials. Earth is the foundation. Stone, brick and tile give it shape and have the strength to hold back earth to create paths, retaining walls and terraces. Driftwood is purely decorative. Brick and rocks are all good, but you've got to respect their weight, and be careful when you arrange them so that they stick to stable shapes. You can get a bit more adventurous with driftwood, especially when it's shape forms a natural arch, giving you some airy, negative space in the focal points of a landscape.

It Floats!: Well, why do you think it's called "driftwood?" Driftwood is an interesting addition to a large Water Feature because unless it's an especially dense variety, it floats. You'll have to attach it to a weight but after you do you'll find it adds something special to the middle of a pond. When it comes to specific water feature, you'll have to test out how a given piece of driftwood floats. This is fine, because driftwood requires a little improvisation anyway - it's par for the course for an organic material where every piece is different.

Basalt Rock for Landscaping and Hardscaping

Hey! Some of you have dropped by Cascading Creations looking for basalt. We use it in landscaping and hardscaping projects. We sell basalt for landscaping, too, just in case you'd like to lug heavy rocks around by yourself (hint: It's easy for us because we use machines - you can hire us to use them and save your backs . . .). Basalt is a great material that's tough, durable and comes in a variety of colors, shapes and textures. We have it in girly pink, manly gray basalt and more. (Don't worry - we'll never judge you based on your personal basalt choices!)

Basalt has so much variation because it's volcanic rock. Deep beneath the earth, lava is churning and moving, creating the very stones you will eventually put your beer on during a summer cookout. Its characteristics come from how it was formed, from the melted minerals its composed of to the way the earth ejected it. Basalt formations take all kinds of interesting shapes, from Ireland's Giant's Causeway to the nifty rocks we sell in our landscaping materials yard.

Basalt can come in rough or smooth textures, and often features hundreds of hollow chambers, making it lighter than it looks (though naturally it's still rock, not styrofoam). Rough basalt gives moss plenty of traction. That's what allows us to sell mossy rock right from the yard. It's a great way to make your landscape look nicely aged and natural, even when it's brand new.

It's a great material for hardscapes, too. It's a nice, contrasting natural-shaped rock to offset the regular geometry of brick or tile. Thanks to its variety, you can usually find basalt to match your brickwork without too much trouble.

Basalt has always been a popular material, so the one thing we can't claim is originality - people have used it to build stuff for thousands of years. It was good enough for ancient fortresses and even entire cities, so it'll probably do a decent job of giving your friends a spot to park their butts in your backyard. Give it a try!

Our Materials Yard

Okay, we love to scramble over your yard with heavy equipment, toss rocks around and generally get a beautiful landscaping job done, but we know that a lot of you like to do that, too. So not to long ago I asked myself, "Self, how can I help Spokane area residents get their do-it-yourself landscaping jobs done? How can I get them to pay me for their work?"

And Self answered: "Don't build it and they will come."

"What do you mean?"

"You should know, man. I'm your inner voice."

"Oh yeah. You mean I should let people come and buy the materials I use every day!"

Then my inner voice asked for a sandwich. While I ate lunch, I pondered the greatness of this idea. Once I was really impressed with myself, I told everybody else and we got some work done!

The result is our landscaping materials yard. Since we're landscaping pros it was easy for us to pick the right materials to stock. All we had to do is look at the landscaping and hardscaping we do all across Washington, think of the materials we use and take them to the yard.

Now we specialize in hardscapes, but we've got plenty of materials to suit other landscaping projects. For example, one of my favorite items is our wood stone. It looks like bark chips and absorbs water like them, but it's tough and doesn't fade. We've got driftwood, granite and a bunch of soil varieties. If you want to do Spokane area landscaping, check it out!

Five Cool Hardscaping Elements

People often come to me with a rough idea of what they want but they're not sure how to put it in words. Pictures help a lot; when a customer points to something and says, "Make it look like that" I immediately know what he's talking about. What's harder is when someone wants to change their property, but needs a bit of extra guidance. I've always got plenty of ideas but at the end of the day, customers have to live with it. If I can inspire them they'll get more involved in planning their hardscapes and make them a lot more satisfied with the end product.

One way to get the ball rolling is to talk about particular design elements. If a customer really likes one, it turns into the center of the whole project. If you're looking for a starting point like this, consider the following five hardscaping elements:

Vertical focal points: If you have enough room, consider a vertical hardscape feature. Depending on what you go for these can offer shade, privacy and a way to unify the entire space's composition. People tend to look at vertical elements first, so arranging everything else around it gives you a way to guide a visitor's eyes. Examples include archways, decorative walls and rough stone piles. You can also build around a natural vertical feature like a tree.

Space divisions: Always remember that hardscapes are outdoor living spaces. People want to be able to sit comfortably, without feeling exposed or getting baked by the sun. Even when you want a big open space there should still be a nice little nook suitable for reading. Use screens, raised planters, walls and fences but be careful, because you want a sense of flow and unity with the rest of the area. If you divide the space too strongly it'll look like a stockade.

Grade adjustments: Some slopes are cool. They provide natural support for water features and flagstone stairs and give you a high place from which to enjoy the view. On the other hand, it's no fun to constantly have your stuff roll into a ditch because your backyard is just a big hill. To get the best of both worlds, level off part of the natural slope and support it with an attractive retaining wall. If you've got a serious incline, turn it into several flat levels. You can even add some stairs to go from place to place, or a water feature to unify all sections.

Complementary and contrasting textures:I touched on this a little bit in my last post on stone carving and engraving. The natural environment (which in Washington, can be almost anything) and previous landscaping determine the base texture. As a general rule, trimmed grass, terraces and other heavily landscaped features complement smooth or obviously man-made hardscaping elements like brick, tile and concrete. Natural-looking features go with rough stone. This is a decent guideline, but you can get as much out of breaking it as following it. A rough decorative wall bordering a brick patio or a concrete slab for a sitting space in a wild-looking garden both provide dramatic contrasts. They attract the eye to the distinct elements in each feature.

Color and light: These related concepts are always a big deal. For a cool space, the ideal combination is shade and a light tone. The tone reflects heat but the shade prevents glare. Darker colors work well when it's not as warm and on a cloudy day, they don't take on the dreary quality of the light. It'd be great if we could change a hardscape's color whenever the weather shifted but the reality is that you've got to make a choice. My advice is to pick one and then use all kinds of tricks to minimize the drawbacks when the weather isn't optimal. Use light-toned flowers and patio furniture to take the edge from dark tones in the summer. In cloudy seasons, light colored patios can do with a splash of warm color. Use earth tones from nearby natural stone to heat things up.