For those of you who have visited our Materpiece home  grounds in Minnetonka you often comment how lush everything appears  to be.   

I do too.  

First, by the luck of the  ‘home’ draw where I live, the soil nearly throughout the grounds is loamy and deep.   Second, I have only a nine minute lawn mowing reponsibility here leaving 90% of the land space, minus house, garage, and driveway, ‘open’ country for landscape gardening.

 I then have removed the original lawn to plant bit by bit, year by year, form by form, grouping by grouping,  the paradise landscape garden where I live.    Every fall I have embellished the soil by covering it with leaves, mostly oak leaves.  

These leaves, if moistened, rather quickly decay adding ’tilth’ to the soil.   On their way decaying they need water to hasten the process.    Very important in that process is the regularity of that water throughout the growing season both for plant growth and health and for quality soil maintainence.

Regularly available water is vital not only for the general  health of the plants, but for their  look as well.  As the leaves covering the grounds decay, available water allows the acids they release   to unite with nutrients of the fertilizers you have applied,  to become  more readily, more quickly available for use by neighboring plantings.

A result whether desireable or not, is most plants grow bigger and faster than the catalogues or your fellow garden friends who do not have  a watering system claim.

The original watering system in our Masterpiece grounds was installed in 1990.   I was not financially able to use it for about six years but eventually  I hired a local company to activate it.   

Eventually when Masterpiece was installing a landscape garden at a Kenwood home in Minneapolis, the homeowner introduced me to a ‘sprinkler’ guy she had hired after investigating  “sprinkler” guy businesses.    He thought water sprinkling was beautiful.   He saw its spray refreshing the plants in its range, the way gals swoon when they smell a fragrant rose.  

Let’s call him Jim.    Jim has had control over watering our Masterpiece landscape garden in Minnetonka ever since that day in 1998.    Jim  also installs and maintains the watering systems for all of our irrigating Masterpiece clients.

In my unscientific, but in my view, accurate, survey from experience, Nine out of Ten plant deaths in the gardened grounds are cause by drought.   Nearly all damage upon plants is caused by Winter.   Among the ten percent of remaining deaths to garden plants one can add all those  caused by  insect and disease agents, caused by winter kill, automobile stress and child ill treatment…..whatever killing agent you can think of.

The installed watering system to cover and acre might be rather expenseive.   But for most gardened grounds of the average resident home the installation of an irrigation system is not expensive.    If budgeting is a problem, think about irrigating the garden area which might benefit most from regular watering.

Winter blowout of the system and Spring set up are ‘small change’ in the house maintenance budget.

Give us a call at Masterpiece Landscaping, Ltd for an estimate…..952 933 5777.