Environmental Insights

With unemployment at a nearly fifty year low, this is the most difficult labor market I can ever recall in my entire 29 years in business.  Finding competent, hardworking people who want landscaping jobs in the numbers we need is just plain tough right now.

Recently, we were contacted by a nice couple who owns a property in Glenwood, a tiny rural town in south-central Georgia. It had a lovely view of a beautiful pond. They’d owned the home for a while, but now that they were both retired, they were ready to turn it into the home of their dreams.

Luis Arreguin  hasn’t been with T. Lake for long – just since last August. But in that short amount of time, we’ve come to appreciate him as a valuable team member and a great guy to have around.

Luis started his career in landscaping back in high school, working at a plant nursery. He earned a degree in horticulture from Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College, but left the industry for eight years selling used car parts. After a while, though, he realized his heart was in landscaping. He says “I would always be working at home on my yard, or just working on somebody else’s yard on the side.” Eventually, his passion for plants led him back to the landscape industry, where he found his place at T. Lake.

Landscapes have a life span. Not only do trees and beds get bedraggled and overgrown, infrastructure wears out and trends change, but your needs change, too, over time. What once was the ideal recreational space for a growing family may not feel so attractive any more when your focus has shifted to entertaining or to new pastimes such as yoga or meditation. Or, maybe you finally have the budget to build that show-stopping outdoor paradise you’ve always dreamed of.

Most landscape designers have to work in the industry for a while before they start earning accolades. Not Robert Arrington. Robert got his first taste of the landscape industry in FFA while in high school, where he was part of both the nursery landscape and floriculture teams. He had the chance to compete in the national competition for nursery landscape where the team placed 3^rd overall. Robert says his experience drawing up a landscape plan to meet guidelines for the competition was pivotal to his decision to pursue a career in the landscape industry.

Got a call recently from some friends who had just returned from a trip to Spain. While there, they fell in love with the simple but formal European garden look – the sculpted topiaries, pollards, and tasteful incorporation of architectural elements in the landscape. Could we recreate something like that for them?

Looking for a job is a full time job in itself. And because it’s a job with zero upfront benefits and no pay (yet), it’s tempting to simply grab job opportunities as they arise and hope they will work out OK. But taking a bit of time to sort out in advance whether a company is a good match for you helps both you and your prospective employer.

When you walk into an interview knowing a company is a good fit, it gives you a boost of confidence that will help you stand out from the crowd. And, finding a work environment that suits your personality and working style will make a big difference in how fulfilled you feel once you actually start working there—as well as advancement and career opportunities down the road.

At T. Lake, we’re busy. Really busy. Which is why we’re always interested in speaking with potential new hires—but to be quite open and frank, only if there’s a good chance we’ll be a happy match. So before you reach out to us, here are a few job seeking tips to help you decide if T. Lake is the right company for you.

Every once in a blue moon, a technology comes along that radically changes the way we do things. The advent of computer aided design (CAD) in the 1960’s heralded an incredible explosion in capabilities in all areas of design. Landscape design is, of course, no exception, but it does present certain challenges.

Unlike many other types of design, which can be executed in a purely conceptual manner, in landscape design we have to work with existing terrain. This means that proper assessment and surveying of the site is critical – not an easy task given the scale and accessibility issues involved.

If you have any background in IT, you know that that no matter how sophisticated the programming or talented the programmer, the quality of input data is critical to outcome. This applies to CAD as well. That’s why we are over-the-top excited to put our new Phantom 4 landscape drone to work on landscape design projects.

Happy Valentine’s! If you’ve been following our blog lately, you’ve probably already taken note of our love affair with our new DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 quadcopter landscape drone. In fact, we’ve become rather infatuated with it. Not because drones are cool (which they are), but also because of the sheer multitude of ways our drone saves time, saves money, and generally makes life and landscaping a lot easier both for us and our commercial landscape  construction and landscape maintenance clients.

“But wait!”  I hear you say. “That’s all very well for massive commercial projects. But what about your residential customers?”

Well, if you’re thinking of upgrading your residential landscape this spring or summer, there’s plenty of love in the air for you, too.

We just can’t get enough of our new Phantom 4 drone. As we explained in our last post,  we purchased it as a safety and efficiency solution for a commercial construction project. And it is proving to be an absolute workhorse on commercial construction and civil engineering jobs.

But that’s turning out to be just the tip of the iceberg. We’re finding that the drone has applications for virtually everything we do here at T.Lake. Today, let’s take a look at what a drone can bring to commercial landscape maintenance projects.