Setting Your Sites: Planning Installation

According to Thomas Bolas, "you have to break a few eggs to make a cake."

This is how Bolas, design/build manager and landscape architect for Martin Associates, Vernon Hills, Ill., explains to his clients that although their landscape will be kept clean during installation, there’s going to be a little bit of a mess before their site looks like the panorama they envisioned.

How organized landscape contractors are when preparing their clients’ landscapes for an installation project can keep them on deadline and cause fewer headaches during the installation and even years after the finished project has blossomed into an established landscape.

DIG SAFE. More than anything else, initially, site preparation takes a lot of phone calls, pointed out Paul Shilhan, construction supervisor, Pellettieri Associates Landscape Architecture and Construction, Warner, N.H. One of the most important calls goes to a utility locator company that will come to the site and determine the location of all the subsurface utilities and mark their location on the ground one week before the installation is scheduled to begin.

"Legally, digging cannot occur on a site before calling a utility locator company," Shilhan stressed. "Gas or electric lines are supposed to be 3 feet underground, but that’s not always the case. Even if you are planting just a few trees, and especially if you are going to be planting more than 1 foot into the ground, you should call a utility locator company in your region. This is important to do to protect your workers from a dangerous gas leak and to protect you from having to pay to repair such a leak."

Clients should also be able to provide contractors with a plan of their yard to determine the location of the sewer lines, Shilhan said.

"We have septic systems and leach fields in New Hampshire," he remarked. "And accidentally digging into these areas can be a costly mess for landscape contractors."

The drainage of water on a site should also be checked out. Walkways, driveways and other hardscapes should not be negatively affected by the drainage on a site, Shilhan explained.

"You have to know how a client’s home reacts to water and rainfall," Shilhan said. "If you’ve installed a walkway or a patio and the first rainfall leaves a huge puddle in the middle of it, that’s not acceptable. Especially in a climate where water can freeze during cold months and people can get hurt."

Also, if clients don’t know what their community regulations are as far as planting or removing trees from a site concerns and whether permits are required, they should pay landscape contractors to find this information out, Shilhan explained.

"Permits are usually required in small towns and residential communities," Shilhan said. "These documents give you permission to cut down a certain number of trees and can restrict the number of trees you plant, according to local conservation commissions."

While there are many aspects of protecting contractors from potential installation hazards during site preparation, there are also things contractors can do to protect their clients and their clients’ neighbors, such as flagging areas off where someone could fall into a hole or covering it with plywood.

"Having an installation crew move into the neighborhood can be somewhat intimidating to the community," noted George Kotalic, president, Kotalic Landscaping, Huntington, W. Va. "We try to contact the neighbors near the scope of the work and let them know that we are going to be in the neighborhood for a few days with an equipment trailer installing a landscape. If we can’t reach them we have preprinted door hangers that we hang on neighbors’ doors to let them know we’re working in the immediate area and if they have any questions or concerns, our phone number is there for them to use."

Kotalic said contacting his clients’ neighbors has been good public relations, has resulted in additional work in the neighborhood and has given him and his employees better access to installation projects.

PROTECT EXISTING PLANTS. Plant materials, especially large trees, that are going to remain on the site as part of a new installation need to be protected during site preparation, particularly because of all of the machinery that will be moved in and out of that site during installation and the grade changes that may be taking place.

Unless the landscape company employs an arborist, landscape contractors should bring one onto the site to determine the health of existing trees, feed them, prune their canopy and their roots and protect their root zone with grade stakes and flagging so equipment isn’t driving over or slicing through them, Shilhan stressed.

"If you are excavating the soil near or around the base of a tree, you want to cut the root and sever them with clean cutting/trenching type machinery rather than a back hoe because the end result is a cleaner, more protected type of cut," Bolas asserted. "And if the roots are located in an area that will be heavily compacted, root pruning will encourage the roots to grow more vigorously back into the area."

Besides protecting trees, existing lawns also need to be protected from heavy machinery. This is typically done by laying plywood over the lawn as not to disturb the compaction level, according to Shilhan. "Using machines with tracks also helps," he said.

The integrity of the soil is also at risk during an installation and needs to be protected. In some situations, if the soil isn’t – or cannot be – protected, it needs to be rebuilt.

"On a larger construction site, dump trucks are almost inevitably going to be backed into the site," Shilhan said. "As the truck slips in the mud and digs deeper and deeper into the soil, it is destroying the soil’s organic matter. A way to avoid this is by peeling back the loam, or top layer of soil, before starting the installation of a large 2- to 3-acre site and then you can drive over the subgrade and stockpile the healthy layer of soil until it is needed for planting."

Stockpiling extra loam at a storage facility or landscape company headquarters is a good idea for contractors in the case that loam needs to be added to the soil to make it healthier for plants and trees to thrive in.

"If the soil is bad, like the soil surrounding a building that has been destroyed by equipment or paint, you can go down 18 inches to 2 feet and add a nice good screen loam," Shilhan said. "We have people supply us loam every year to make sure we have enough on hand."

ORGANIZE SITE MATERIALS. Damage and disruption to a site should be consolidated and kept to a minimum when preparing a site for installation, Kotalic said, and this can be done by taping or staking areas off or making marks on the ground to indicate where different materials need to go. Scheduling material deliveries and organizing the order materials are going to be installed in becomes crucial at this stage.

"If you have a lot of materials delivered to the site, such as gravel, stone dust or brick, you have to make sure you have somewhere to put it," Shilhan urged. "If the customers don’t want material piled up on the property for days, you need to stockpile it at your headquarters and bring it to the site when you need it. But we try not to do that too much. If we know gravel is arriving from the local pit then we plan to use it that day and make sure it is gone. During each installation job preparation, you try to be effective about how the job is going to be run and what equipment will be needed on the job so the site can be kept organized."

Doing an actual layout on the job site can be helpful in keeping materials organized. Shilhan said he actually goes around the site before construction with a tape measure and transit to decide the layout of the site and paint the design out and label it on the grass or use grade stakes and write on them how low or high different grades need to be.

"A lack of planning and putting materials where they don’t belong is one of the worst installation mistakes, especially when the contractor is wasting time moving this material three or four times a day so it is out of the way," Shilhan lamented. "You have to sit down with your crew before you start the job and show them the plan. Walk through the whole planned installation process with them and with your subcontractors. Make sure every member of your crew knows where the different materials need to be and make sure they are kept there. A good installation starts with good organization and plenty of communication."