Landscaping rip off!!!

[Csara]

Last year DH and I had our backyard totally redone. We had a pool built and had a landscape designer come and do all the landscaping around the deck and pool.We also had the front of our house redone. We asked for low maintenance and I'm not so sure that is what we got. Maybe I should have asked for "no maintenance". Everything is pretty much back to where we started. It looks like crap - minus the beautiful pool! Everything around it though is disgusting......dead and weedy. Ugh! We don't know what to do. Is there such a thing as NO MAINTENANCE LANDSCAPING????

[Sydneyp]

Rocks, sand, and cactus are pretty much no maintenance.

[Margarita]

Bummer, C! Are you still stuck wondering what to do? It sounds like you're like me. I don't want to have to spend a lot of time caring for my yard, but I want it to look nice. I'm still trying to figure out how to do that.

[Csara]

I think we are just going to end up paving what little ground we have left and then we'll just use some potted plants. That should be low enough maintenance.

[Margarita]

That's what my parents are going to do when they finish their back yard. You can get it in all sorts of colors that will look like various stones.

[heather6773]

Hey Csara how did the re-landscaping go?

[Turtleheadfred]

Hey C! How's it going now? I can tell you from personal experience (I used to landscape myself) it is a hard job - but it's also easy to get ripped off if someone doesn't know EXACTLY what they're doing!!!

This spring I just wasn't up to weeding my front beds (which are HUGE) so we hired a friend who recently started landscaping to do it for us and to trip the bushes. Well... sometimes if you want something done - you just need to DO IT YOURSELF!!! I'm SO IRRITATED! Like you said - my front (here only a few months later) doesn't look any different than BEFORE we paid all that money.

He wasn't experienced enough to understand the different shrubs and weeds, etc... and YES I've explained it to him now! Some of our shrubs are really fast growing and if they aren't pruned HARD (really cut back) you get what we have now... needing to be cut in the dern middle of summer when it's a gillion degrees outside! :argh:

Likewise, certain weeds have to be DUG up (wild violets for instance) not just pulled - or you can spray them with weed killer before you re-mulch. This guy didn't know that and just pulled stuff and there's just as many weeds - actually more - than there were before. It's what I get for letting him and my hubby (God love him) handle it. Neither of them understood what was what and the front of my house SHOWS IT!!!

Depending on what type of exposure to sun you get, there are some very low maintenance things you can do, but truly, NOTHING is NO MAINTENANCE...
Even if you do the pots by the pool - just remember that you will need to water them more frequently because their pots (obviously) - and each year you'll have to replant them because rarely will they rebloom. (I've had a few rebloom just depending on how hard my winter freeze was).

Hope that helped but if you've got any specific questions - post them here for us or ask me in an e-mail. I'd like to know what you end up doing...... Good Luck!!!

[heather6773]

Hey Csara how did the re-landscaping go?:huh: