Michael Spencer's Make It Green: Questions all homeowners should ask about their lawn care

About this time of the year, your Design Pundit's calendar becomes quite full. Why? Calls from bewildered homeowner's association landscape committees struggling to manage common area landscape improvements. These committees want to do a good job, and I give them simple, straightforward advice based on 30 years' experience. Here are some of the questions:

Is all of this money worth it? The purpose of common area improvements, including plant material, is to support property values. Yes, these are nice, but property values are the main thing. You decide: is it worth it?

How can we control our maintenance company? With good specifications and an informed point-person.

Start with a well-written contract that includes your expectations about trimming every shrub and every tree. Your maintenance contractor is there to serve you and wants to do a good job. Don't be adversarial.

What about bidding? Maintenance bidding puts the HOA in the back seat. The problem? Companies write their own specifications, resulting in apples and oranges. Good specs give you control over every single plant, over the types of equipment used, types of fertilizers and any other issue important to your neighborhood.

Pre-qualify bidders: Look at referenced jobs and talk to other committees. Choose only the best companies to bid. Do not allow walk-in bidding.

Spend time with each bidder to ensure they know what you need. They are professionals who can serve you best when they know what you need. They will bring a wealth of experience to the table.

Designate one or two people through whom all communications to the maintenance people must flow. Don't bother the worker bees and do not be critical if they cannot speak English. Language and horticultural skills are not related. Have a relationship with the foreman or company representative. Unless you are bilingual, insist that the foreman speaks English.

See my website for more information on bidding.

Why do we have to replant so often? Because it wasn't done correctly in the first place, and often because you didn't take care of it.

Planting design is essentially a search for the best horticultural solution. Plants must be chosen carefully and planted with the correct spacing. The result is solid beds of plantings with no visible mulch except on the perimeters of the beds, a result achievable only when you use one type of plant in a given planting area.

Plants don't live forever: five to seven years is reasonable average life expectancy for woody shrubs.

Can we comply with future water restrictions? Maybe.

Two important things to keep in mind: in all likelihood your current system is overwatering. And secondly, if the Water Management District adopts more severe restrictions, you will be required to water only one day a week. Many existing systems are simply not capable of this volume in a single day without revision. Sometimes the revisions are cheap, more often they are not.

How do we reduce our maintenance costs? With specifications, proper plantings, patience, commitment, and a few rules:

It's essential that your planting beds become self-mulching. What does this mean? That plants are sufficiently dense to discourage weeds and to retain soil moisture, a scheme most effectively achieved with monoculture mass plantings. With this technique maintenance and water is dramatically reduced.

Remember that there are dozens of plants that are essentially no maintenance. Trimming shrubs is expensive and mostly avoidable. Why trim a hedge that nobody can see?

No toothpaste plants! Have a look around at square plantings that are so common, especially on our medians. This is a huge maintenance commitment caused by picking the wrong plants. Chose plants that are the correct size at maturity. Do not place a 10-inch plant where a 4 foot plant is desired.

How do we reduce our mulch costs? With mass, monocultural plantings.

The plants in your beds must be properly spaced so that they become self-mulching. This means that the only annual mulch needed is around the perimeter, never in the interior of a bed. Many communities have reduced mulch usage by more than 50 percent as they work through a process of plant replacement.

How do we budget for shrub replacements? This is a tough one because it depends on just how your existing shrubs have been specified. A guideline: expect most shrubs to live about seven years. If you have the correct plants, the arithmetic is simple. If not, then plan on a multiyear effort to bring the property up to speed.

Isn't design just your opinion? No, it is not.

Any questions?

Michael Spencer, ASLA, has been practicing landscape architecture since 1979 and is president of MSA Design Inc. Learn more at www.msadesign.com or contact Michael by email: ms@msadesign.com.