Here's the review.. I'd totally hire Giving Tree Gardens again! Fun, smart, and organic!
I contracted with Giving Tree Gardens to build a patio and a native plant rain garden after having him over for an initial consultation. I'm not a gardener, but I new that I wanted my yard to start looking at least as good as some of my neighbors fancy landscapes, and that I didn't want to have any chemical poisons used in my yard.
In order to get started with Giving Tree I signed up for a consultation at my house. The owner of the company came on site and walked me through my yard pointing out features and plants that I didn't even know I had. We talked about edible weeds, one of them even tasted like lemons... I think it's called sorel. We talked about composting and how it helps grow healthy roots. I learned that there's good compost and cheap compost available for sale in the Twin Cities. Apparently the good compost costs a little more but does a lot more good for the soil. They showed me how to operate a compost system for my kitchen and yard scraps, and they told me how to properly prune my apple tree.
When we started talking about landscape design, I knew I was going to work with this company. Their approach to design was disarming and not pretentious like other landscaping companies that I've worked with. During the consultation they helped me visualize by first outlining a patio and garden using my garden hose, then eventually I contracted with them for a beautiful landscape drawing that showed how my garden and patio would look after installation. Giving Tree Gardens offered me several varieties of patio stone and bricks to choose from. I chose a natural stone patio with a brick walkway outline. My expectations for how good the final patio installation would look were completely blown away. For the rest of the summer after it was installed, regularly have friends and neighbors over to sit on the patio and sip wine and watch the butterflies in the rain garden.
The rain garden that Giving Tree Gardens installed for me captures about half of the water from my roof. The back half of my roof gutters both drain into the new garden and it's fun to watch the water flow in and drain into the ground. Butterflies started visiting only a couple weeks after the garden was installed. By the end of the first season, the plants had grown to almost fill in the entire garden space.
Their installation crew consisted of the owner of the company, a hippy, and a middle school science teacher with his summer off. I loved the couple opportunities I had to watch them work together in a kind of zen ballet of big men moving large objects gracefully about. They work pretty hard and seem to get things done at a much faster pace then I had imagined. The whole crew seemed to be health nuts cause they were always stretching and I think one of them ate kale for lunch one day. This fits with the fact that they didn't use any chemicals or pesticides to get rid of the weeds in the rest of my landscape and they planted pollinator safe, untreated native plants so that I didn't have to worry about poisoning the bees. read more