How to Save Money in Your Landscape Budget

Good morning!

Sent out the freshest issue of Quercus News this morning all about how to save money in your landscape budget. Here is the main article about three different methods for saving money. Enjoy!

Each year, you work very hard as a property manager to create your budgets. This year is proving very difficult and everyone is looking for ways to cut money from their budgets. Quercus, Inc. is here to guide you with ways to save money on your landscape budget along with promoting.

1) Reduce Your Turf Area

Turf maintenance is one of the largest items in your budget. Use this opportunity to reduce the turf area on your properties and while promoting environmentally responsible practices. By reducing turf areas you:

• save money on your contract now and in the future.
• reduce chemical inputs.
• reduce water use.
• reduce fuel consumption for mowers and line trimmers.
• reduce noise.
• reduce chemical and topsoil runoff.
• improve air and water quality.

There are many different avenues for reducing your turf area yielding great results.

• Simply cease mowing. Minnesota’s turf grass’ natural tendency is to grow 6-10″ tall. It has a wonderful flow and stays greener through summer months with less water. This works well large areas and also little-used

Quercus News: Celebrate Fall

Good evening!

Early IREM meeting tomorrow so I wanted to get Quercus News out tonight – you

Serviceberry in Fall

can check it out before it is sent to our clients! This Quercus News has a little different feel than our last few newsletters. It is a tad more laid back echoing the fall season.

Quercus News: Celebrate Fall

Let me know what you think and have a great day!

Brad

Great Mississippi Watershed Management Organization Booklet

Good Fall afternoon! (bums me out to say that)

Tomorrow I am giving a presentation at Ryan Companies at their Brown Bag Seminars (promoting work/life balance. Ryan is great!) about how to improve water quality with your own landscape and ran across this wonderful booklet from the Mississippi Watershed Management Organization (MWMO) called “Green Spaces, Clean Waters. Landscaping ideas to improve water quality along the Mississippi River.”

It has ideas for your commercial sites, home and neighborhood. Check the booklet cover below (opens as pdf) and have a great day!

Brad

Quercus News: How can you save 89,000 gallons of water in one month? Install a Smart Irrigation Controller

The newest addition of Quercus News was just sent out! We talk this month about how we installed a Smart Irrigation Controller on a small commercial site that saved

A smart controller looks just like a regular controller except it is hooked to a weather station on site. It then waters to whatever the turf needs in the current weather.

89,000 gallons of water and $235.00 in costs. I am pretty excited! Here it is:

Quercus News: How can a Smart Controller help you?

Have a wonderful Labor Day Weekend and go Cyclones!

Brad

Water (and Cash) Conservation with Smart Irrigation Controllers

Good afternoon all!

I am studying the numbers from a smart irrigation controller we installed in the beginning of August with wonderful results. I will send it out in our Quercus News tomorrow – but here is a little preview. We saved over 88,000 gallons of water on a fairly small retail site over what would have normally run in August. It has amazed me.

Have a great day and look for our newsletter tomorrow.

Brad

PS: If you don’t receive our newsletter, sign up here.

Trees need some lovin’ too!

The dog-days of summer have officially arrived in Minnesota – except this year they are a bit different. We have been having cool and dry weather. Luckily the cooler weather is helping our plants but they still need a lot of water to stay healthy.

Just this past week, we have had a couple of weaker trees die on properties due to drought stress.

Trees are on irrigated properties, they should be receiving plenty of water with the irrigation system. Trees on unirrigated properties need to start watering their trees and taking a few corrective

Urban trees have a tough time in drought and need some extra lovin.

actions:

1) Put a hose out near the trunk and let water trickle at low level for an 1/2 hour or so. Don’t let water run off, just enough to introduce it into the root zone.

2) Mulch the trees. Installing mulched tree rings reduces the tree’s competition for water with the turf, keeps the soil cooler and returns nutrients to the root zone as the mulch breaks down.

3) Monitor your trees for stress. Younger trees and trees where the soil has been disturbed in recent years have the most difficult time navigating droughts – give them some love.

Have a great day!

Bad

A New Era of Conservation: Minnesota’s Water Conservation Rates

Starting January 1, 2010, Minnesota is mandating water conservation by requiring public water suppliers adopt a Conservation Rate Structure.

How will this affect you? Read on…

History

Beginning in the early 1990’s, municipalities throughout Minnesota enacted water restrictions to curb water usage – especially during summer months when incredible amounts of water are used for keeping lawns green.

The Minnesota DNR released an informational paper in 2000 regarding Minnesota’s Water Supply. It informs, “Water conservation plays an important role in balancing management objectives including both development and protection of Minnesota’s water resources.”

Conservation Water Rates

The 2008 Minnesota Legislature amended statutes to adopt Conservation Water Rate structures that encourage conservation as opposed to bulk water usage. Simply put, the more water you use, the more you will pay per gallon. This will greatly affect the cost to irrigation many commercial buildings.

Rate structures must fall into one or more of these rate categories:

* Increasing Block – Rate per unit increases within specified blocks. The increase should encourage conservation.

Did you hear it? The plant world’s collective sigh of relief…

We have finally gotten some rain in Minnesota over the last week. Not a crazy amount of rain – but enough to make our world a little greener and feel happier.

There is something fairly serious here we need to talk about – not simply our dry spell or our manicured lawn browning out a bit – but our massive use of water needs to be rethought. Paul Hutner’s Updraft Blog on MPR’s website is very good at laying out our current weather predicaments. He tells us that ‘June is normally our wettestmonth [of the year}’ and that 45% of Minnesota is experiencing drought conditions. We’ll see how the rest of the month shapes up.

Next week, I will be bringing to you some ideas on how we can affect change in the landscape with regards to how we use water and protect our future water usage.