Cue: The intersection of landscape design and call before you dig | Local News
The ask for to the 811 middle was like quite a few gained — find the utilities because the homeowner wished to Do-it-yourself a new privateness fence. After the utilities were being marked, the homeowner started to dig holes for the uprights, considering every flag marked the place he Ought to dig, in its place of where by he Should really NOT dig.
Right after severing the utility in multiple sites, a hefty great, and expenditures to reinstate the utility, the home owner arrived away with a new appreciation for all that goes on beneath the soil surface. He was blessed due to the fact none of the damaged traces influenced folks or home. Things could have been even worse because what goes on below floor, overhead (assume electrical strains), and nearby (homes, outbuildings) all effect the projects we undertake to have safe and sound and beautiful outside house.
This story may well cause you to shake your head, but the purpose for sharing is to foster an knowledge that a lot of landscape potential risks and blunders are preventable. Failures at the purposeful degree of landscape style contain:
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- Planting an evergreen that will mature or has grown to block the home’s entrance (“Where’s the entrance door?!?”)
- Vegetation positioned too shut to utility boxes that may well demand excavation to service them, destroying valued trees and shrubs.
- Installation of lifted beds about trees. (A excellent way to destroy trees.)
- Planting grass on slopes too steep to mow safely.
- Retaining walls that are unsuccessful mainly because they were improperly created or far too tall to endure soil expansion.
- Not finding underground utilities ahead of digging. (Nebraska 811)
- Trees that mature into overhead electrical lines because tiny care was provided to how tall the tree species grows.
- Planting trees about septic traces, resulting in root invasion and again-up of movement through pipes.
- Quite and inventive outside areas could appear the only target of landscape layout, but when I teach Nebraska Extension Learn Gardeners on the topic, perform is emphasized with a concentrate in the direction of blocking high priced landscape faults and holds equivalent great importance to aesthetics. Right after all, what great is a gorgeous landscape if rainfall will cause soil erosion or standing water increases mosquito populations?
No one plants a tree with the intention of acquiring to take away it mainly because it’s useless or a hazard but opportunities to make corrections at the beginning when answers are simpler are as well usually ignored.
Applying these cornerstones in the course of arranging and installation are vastly important to effective landscapes that will stand the exam of time:
- Basic safety very first.
- Landscape structure is a difficulty-fixing procedure, not a difficulty-generating course of action.
- Kind follows operate. Get the technological stuff appropriate initially just before tackling the really.
- Correct plant, proper area.
- Get in touch with just before you dig, Nebraska 811.
- Enlist the aid of a expert to response thoughts and troubleshoot probable challenges.
Kathleen Cue is an ISA & TRAQ Accredited Arborist and a Nebraska Extension Horticulture Educator for Dodge County. She can be reached at: 1206 West 23rd Street, Fremont, NE 68025-2504 (402) 727-2775 or [email protected].