Landscape Supplies in Spokane WA

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Three Artsy Landscaping Tips

We’re practical folks, but we like to think we have an eye for beauty. Working as Spokane landscaping contractors we’ve certainly gotten our fair share of landscaping testimonials, so I think we can share three simple tips about the composition of your outdoor space. Mind you, anything you go with has to butt up against cold reality. Landscaping and hardscaping jobs need proper drainage and well-constructed features. We’ve got a Spokane area landscaping materials yard for those of you who want to do it yourself, but if your job is ambitious, remember that you can always give us a call.

Anyway, here are the tips!

Anticipate Use

It’s a no brainer: If you want a landscape to work, you need to think of how people will interact with it. You see problems all the time in places like shopping malls and public parks, where the designers didn’t really think of how people would react to the space once it was dressed with furniture, or where people would actually tend to cluster. That’s why, for instance, you have mall areas that attract teenage skateboarders instead of shoppers, or bottlenecks created by people sitting on retaining walls just off of a thoroughfare. (Hint: People always sit on retaining walls!) The best way to figure this out is to tour the space yourself. Try laying out some furniture and boxes to get a rough ides of where people will go in the finished space.

Vary Color, Shape and Texture

Even if you’re dead set on a huge, flat, brick patio you should change up the color, shape and texture in the area. There needs to be something interesting to set your eyes anywhere you look, and a perfectly even slab of bricks gets tired really fast. As you can see from our concrete hardscapes we switch up the look a bit even in very large spaces. It doesn’t matter so much in areas you’re going to dress with furniture, but make sure to spruce up edges with different colors, moving from smooth to rough textures, and laying things out without relying exclusively on straight lines. We like the natural look, so make sure any hardscaped elements fit the surrounding softscape’s contours.

Define Level and Height

Rolling hills look great on postcards, but up close, they’re not so exciting – your yard may have just half a hill and all it does is make it hard to set down a picnic table. That’s where softscapes held by retaining walls come in. These let you sculpt the space into definite levels that can be flat enough to be functional as garden space, patio space or anything else you want. Once you have these, adding gentle sloping back is just a matter of moving dirt. We’re not totally anti-hillock, but make sure you treat it as something you can control, instead of working around for less than ideal results. If your space is flat, add levels, either by moving earth or by using stone and brick walls. This makes the space more intimate and interesting.

Spokane! Gaze Upon Our Mighty Landscaping Machines!

Like most guys, one of my goals in life has been to command a giant robot and use it to cut a swath of mechanized destruction across the land, but unlike them, I actually got my wish. That’s the great thing about landscaping. This time around I’d like to show you all the cool stuff that, as Spokane landscaping contractors, we’re lucky enough to be able to drive around.

Our workhorse is the John Deere 35D. There’s not much that can match it for versatility and power at that size. Better yet, the compact cab and 360 degree rotation means this can fit into surprisingly tight or awkward spaces, so the 35D is our go-to machine for a huge number of landscaping jobs. We use a range of attachments to get the most out if.

35D with Grapple

This thing is a ton of fun to use. The clamshell excavator/grapple can pick up huge rocks with ease, kind of like a merciless giant robot. This is great for wide area digging on rocky ground. In the Spokane region’s rocky terrain we often have cause to use this.

35D with Auger

Watching people screw up with a handheld auger is both hilarious and scary. It’s hilarious, because, because you get to see a couple of guys get thrown, but scary since people can actually get hurt. There’s no physical comedy or danger with the 35D’s attachment and it gets the job done fast.

35D with Rock Breaker

Nothing’s more fun than being able to smash stuff with a giant hydraulic limb. As an added bonus, the rock breaker is a great way to quickly dispose of an old slab of concrete or anything else that’s tough, solid and a pain to move.

Other Toys

We also use a Thomas 85 Mini Skidsteer a loader/grader and several other machines. The end result of having all of this mechanical muscle is that we can perform almost any job rapidly, including work on large properties where you need to get in, take care of multiple jobs and leave.

Remember: You can always take a look at our toys page to see what we’re using!

Landscapers Ready for a Heavy Winter

Cascading Creations Expands Spokane, Washington Area Landscaping Services for the Winter

Airway Heights, WA – January 21, 2009: Monte Tareski wasn’t alarmed by news about increased cold and snow this winter. The head of Spokane area landscaping company Cascading Creations (http://www.cascadingcreations.com) has spent the past several years expanding his business beyond seasonal landscaping jobs. For Tareski, the secret to success is having fun. “Let’s face it,” said Tareski. “It’s all about finding excuses to drive heavy machinery all year round.”

Tareski and the other members of his family business have found ample reason to use Cascading Creations’ heavy equipment fleet beyond traditional, seasonal landscaping jobs.

During the winter, the company is well-known in the area for its snow removal services. Monte Tareski appears on Spokane radio station 93.7 “The Cat” on Friday mornings with related news and advice. The company’s website proudly displays a letter from Nine Mile Falls Elementary School thanking Monte and crew for clearing the blacktop. Cascading Creations now takes snow removal jobs by email as well; mail to monte@cascadingcreations.net goes straight to the snow removal crew on site.

In addition to snow removal, the company has added a landscaping materials yard for Spokane-area gardeners and landscapers. Cascading Creations recently raised the roof on the yard, turning it into a true all weather retail outlet. In addition to raw materials the store also sells work from local artisans. Visitors will immediately notice examples of stone engraving: a long time family trade.

“Stone engraving is another great year round aspect of our business,” said Tareski. “We do work on everything from monument-sized boulders to small pieces that can fit a mantelpiece.” Pieces can be commissioned by phone or purchased from the online storefront at http://www.gardenstonecreations.net.

Even though the company has expanded in several directions, the Cascading Creations team is still enthusiastic about doing traditional landscaping jobs all year round.

“I would never turn down an excuse to drill, smash, move and grapple stuff in a John Deere machine,” said Tareski. “As long as we can do it safely, we’ll do it in any season.”

About Cascading Creations

Cascading Creations is a Spokane, Washington area landscaping and hardscaping company specializing in water features, landscaping materials, eco-friendly, minimal impact landscaping and stone engraving. The company’s expertise and fleet of specialized equipment allows it to complete very challenging jobs quickly and efficiently – and with enthusiasm. Visit http://www.cascadingcreations.com for more information.

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!