Landscaping I - Lawn

We didn't get started on landscaping until after construction was complete and we moved in.  We had hopes that our lawn would soon be green like our neighbors' lawns.  Looking at the calendar, it seems more likely that our lawn won't look like the neighbors' until all of them are white.

The soil on our lot is clay.  After the finish grading and stone removal, several truck loads of topsoil were delivered and spread.

We decided to have underground sprinklers installed right away.  Installing the sprinkler system required running a 1" pipe to the outdoors.  It would have been much easier to do that while doing the rough plumbing.  Once the drywall ceiling was installed in the basement, it was much more difficult.  The fact that we extended the patio further than originally planned made it impossible to simply go straight out from the back of the workshop.  Also, since we have two driveways, it was necessary to bore under one of them.  It would have been much easier if we had buried some plastic tubing before doing the concrete driveway.

This shows the landscape contractor pulling the pipes for the irrigation system with a trencher. 

After the irrigation system was installed, the landscape contractor applied hydro-seed.

The hydro-seed was not applied until a couple days before Halloween.  We had an unusually warm November, but that was not enough for the lawn to come in.  As of early December, there is grass if you look close, but that doesn't count as a lawn.  The contractor says that the seed will go dormant during the winter like grass does and will come in strong next spring.

We get a big puddle at the back of the patio every time it rains.  This takes days to dry up.  Hopefully, once we have grass, the grass will absorb it faster.  If not, I need to come up with some other plan.

In the spring, we plan to put in a handful of small bushes and spread wood chips around most of the perimeter of the house.  We are aiming for low maintenance.