Raising the Roof on 2009

We've expanded our Spokane area landscaping materials yard. We've put together a big new building (with the titular roof) to house all of the cool landscaping supplies and crafts we have for sale. This should be handy during the rainy, snowy winter season. This is also the place to go to check out some of our stone engravings.

2009 looks like it's going to be a pretty exciting year for us. The landscaping materials yard only has a fraction of the cool stuff we've expanded into. Have you ever heard of Xeriscaping? It's a low impact environmentally friendly landscaping method designed to conserve water. This is a great idea for some of the rocky terrain here in Washington State. We know how to make an area look green and alive without wasting water on the rocks. (If you want to water some rocks, do it with a nice water feature, not your garden hose!)

These jobs will become more important as warm weather approaches. For now, Spokane area snow removal is a big activity for us, especially since this winter, cold weather seems to keep blasting in from the arctic. It's not as bad for those of us living on the Pacific Coast, but there have still been some rather impressive drifts to haul away. This year we've hooked email right up to our snow removal machines so you can email monte@cascadingcreations.net to book same day snow removal. We just add you to our schedule as we go!

One last thing: We'll be at the Spokane Home and Yard Show. The show runs from February 26th to march 1st. Come see our engravings, crafts and other fun stuff. We look forward to seeing you!

The Manly Art of Engraving Stone

We’re landscapers. We do burly lifting. We break rocks. We use big machines. We do sweaty, dirty excavation around Spokane. We carve pretty butterflies on stones.

Say what?

No, seriously. Butterflies on stones – and they look darned good. Of course, we can engrave pretty much anything that’s family friendly. This is an aspect of Cascading Creations we’re especially proud of because it demonstrates the wide range of skills we’ve developed in this industry. We like the fact that even though we’re well-known for a naturalistic, low impact landscaping style we can get the most delicate, polished details down. In fact, there’s nothing quite like offsetting a water feature made of rough stone by polishing part of one of the stones and giving it a custom engraving.

One of the drawbacks of being able to get so much detail on to stone is that the Web’s display resolution just doesn’t do our engravings justice. Believe it our not, the rock picture of our Washington State landscaping offices hasn’t been tweaked with Photoshop to add our logo – no, that involved a chisel!

We’ve become pretty well-known for stone engraving over the years, so we’ve expanded into a sister business GardenStone Creations. We do the kind of site-installed stone engraving you’d see in landscaping projects, but branching into a new business also allows us to tackle smaller engraving projects, such as personal stone keepsakes, or engraved rocks you can move around to decorate a garden or other landscape by yourself.

Check http://www.gardenstonecreations.com out, but come back often, as we’re just starting to add stock. Keep in mind, however, that we can engrave almost anything on any-sized rock by itself or as part of a landscaping job. Give us a call to see what we can engrave for you!

Our Low Impact Landscaping Approach

We’ve always prided ourselves on an ecologically conscious approach to landscaping around the Spokane area. This is often called low impact landscaping and it’s how we prefer to do things here at Cascading Creations, but we haven’t brought it to people’s attention until recently, when we updated our landscaping website.

Low impact landscaping relies upon research, practical knowledge and more than a little common sense to reduce the environmental impact of landscaping jobs, both on and off the actual site. We use a mix of strategies to make landscaping as eco-friendly as possible. These include the following:

Local Materials: We use local materials whenever possible. Fortunately, Washington State has so much variety that much of the time, we don’t have to go far to get the landscaping rock we need. The local ecology is adapted to local materials (obviously!) and this saved energy that would have been spent hauling rocks across the country.

Recycled Materials: We can recycle materials from your site, rebuilding them into beautiful, functional landscaping features. We’ll still bring in all the stone and other materials we need to do the job right, of course. Afterward, the remainder can be sorted into materials for later jobs.

Energy Conservation: Okay, I admit it: We love our big machines for Washington excavation jobs but there’s a time and place for them. An energy conscious approach means we only bring out the big machines when we need to, and always try to find a more efficient way to do just about everything.

Naturalistic Features: Finally, we like to design Spokane area water features and other jobs to fit with the local ecology. That means using natural methods for drainage where possible, local plants and stones, and landscaping features than, when appropriate, are similar to natural features in the area. This minimizes the disturbance to local plants and wildlife.

That’s basically how we do it, though of course, the details are a bit picky. Give us a holler to find our more!

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.