Environmental Insights

A lot is riding on the contractors you hire to complete your commercial landscaping project, and it's never fun to think about the consequences of something going wrong. Many people are surprised by just how frequently we are called on to carry out emergency landscaping on commercial contracts. In fact, emergency landscaping makes up a large proportion of our annual work. 

In any landscape, sooner or later there comes a time when, well...it’s just time. Time to rip it all out and start over. Whether it’s your grandmother’s half-dead crepe myrtle, the driveway with the lush crop of crabgrass pushing up through the cracks, or that redwood deck that looked so hip in 1988, you kind of just know by looking at it that “the time” has come.

Ask any landscape contractor, big or small, if they have a safety plan and they’ll inevitably say, “Oh yes, of course we do!” But what does that really mean?

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.

A few weeks ago, we introduced our new landscape drone, the DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 quadcopter. In that post, we told the story of the commercial earthwork project that inspired us to invest in this little beauty. Now, let’s take a closer look at exactly how useful a landscaping drone can be on a commercial construction or civil engineering job.

We’re always excited to welcome new team members, especially when they bring diversity and new skills to our team. This fall, we are extra pumped to introduce the newest and most uniquely talented member of the T.Lake team: our brand new DJI Phantom 4 Pro V2.0 quadcopter drone!

Want to know how to install professional-looking landscape lighting? Sure, I can give you some landscape lighting tips. I’ll post a few of my best below.

But first, bear with me, because I just have to rant about what NOT to do with landscape lighting. It’s actually easy to demonstrate. All you have to do is get in your car and ride around after dark. I can almost guarantee that within a few blocks you’ll have passed case after case of really bad lighting installations.

Like the giant square box runway lights that just blast light at a building as if it were daylight, doing nothing to highlight the architecture or evoke a mood.

Or the residence where somebody bought bullet lights and aimed them at a shrub, and it looks like what Moses saw on Mount Horeb: a single bush all alight with nothing but harsh shadows all around.

Or the facade of a house that has a bright, bright light in one spot right next to a patch of blackness so dark the devil could be hiding there. It’s jarring. When will people learn that you can’t just go buy lights and point them at things and expect it to come out looking good?

Now that I’ve got that off my chest, let’s talk about how to do landscape lighting right.

Here at T. Lake we are problem solvers to the core. We love a challenge! In addition to the whole range of landscape work from hardscape design and installation to tree service to wetland mitigation, we’ve done everything from caulking and applying epoxy coatings onto warehouse floors to fly-over roof inspections with drones, to removal of slag and millings from manufacturing floor pits.

Our thought process is to look at the particular issue you have and find a better way to deal with it. This will often require solutions beyond the ordinary—and it is not uncommon for those solutions to require the use of specialty equipment.

We’ll be the first to admit it: T. Lake is not the biggest guy on the block. We’re a local company with local roots and local values. We like it that way.

But, that doesn’t mean we can’t play nice with the giants.

In a recent post, we discussed 5 compelling reasons for commercial real estate developers to feel comfortable working with T.Lake. But not all developers play in the same ballpark. When you start talking the biggest of the big, you’ve got to up the ante.

Very large, national and international contracting companies have unique concerns as well as a more corporate approach to doing business that doesn’t always mesh with the way small business operates. Does T. Lake have what it takes to work successfully with them?

As a matter of fact, we do.