Make your outdoor living space a bit more pleasant with our knowledge of softscaping for Canadian soil. Be it revamping your outdoor space from as simple as re-sodding your lawn to the complexity of water installation services; we will discuss it all in this intro article and an explainer guide.
What is a Softscape?
Softscape involves trees, plants, mulches, grass, etc., all the soft landscape elements of your front or back yard. Softscaping refers to the tasks related to lawn care like planting, fertilization, digging, mowing, etc. ]
These landscape materials enhance the outdoor beauty and goodness of the natural environment that surrounds your home. Did you know? The landscaping service industry is worth $18.4bn, as reported in 2023, and is expected to grow further.
What exactly is included in softscaping?
In a landscape system, all living or soft elements, such as grass, trees, flowers, shrubs, and plants, are considered softscapes. In contrast, all hard elements, like bricks, concrete structures, stone paths, etc., are considered hardscapes.
List of all the softscaping Elements:
- Trees
- Shrubs
- Bushes
- Perennial and Annual Flowers
- Vegetable Garden
- Mulch Beds
- Artificial turf
- Grass
- Soils
- Loams
- Gravel or Stone
- Weed Cloth
- Plants
Importance of Softscaping for Your Home
All these reasons make Softscaping an essential activity for your homes:
- Softscaping helps to nourish the outdoor surrounding beauty of a house.
- It allows you to nurture the natural environment outside of your house.
- It improves your local ecosystem, ultimately improving your mental and physical health.
- Softscaping techniques contribute to hyping up the property value of your land.
- This technique of nourishing your lawn enables you to maintain a healthy ecological environment.
- Seasonal planting, a part of softscaping, brings a more vibrant touch to your hardscape elements in the lawn.
Softscaping Services You Can Avail for Your Home
1. Lawn Mowing Services
Grass cutting is the most essential part of nurturing your beautiful lawn. It’s a weekly activity and a cost-effective method that gives your lawn a fresh look. You can rely on professional lawn mowing services from major softscaping companies for the best results. They knot everything from the best time to cut the grass to the lawn mower to choose which best suits your grass type.
2. Gardening Services
A fact about a beautiful garden is that it transforms a property into something more valuable. And professional gardening service providers can make your lawn look how you want. Skilled gardeners can help you with bush and shrub trimming, weeding, green waste disposal, edging, and more.
3. Lawn Fertilization Services
Lawn fertilization services make your garden even greener. These services involve revitalizing your lawn’s plant nutrients with specific materials and mixtures, thus boosting the health and vitality of your grass. Moreover, fertilizer gives your lawn a healthy, lush green look.
4. Lawn Aeration Services
To improve the poor root growth of your lawn, lawn aeration is one of the most effective services to fix your soil. The Aeration process after 6-7 weeks makes the grass growth rate much faster and the roots much stronger.
Lawn Aeration Services are very cost-effective and efficient. The most beneficial time of year to perform aeration in your garden is Spring and Fall.
5. Weed Control
Weed Control is a process that saves your lawn’s greenery from noxious weed plants. This technique comes under pest control, which effectively stops or reduces the growth of weeds in your garden.
The weed-controlling method is unique for every season. Professionals also suggest scalding the weed with boiling water for complete and permanent removal.
6. Lawn Seeding
Lawn Seeding exactly means adding more seeds in the ground to grow grass. People opt for lawn seeding services to grow grass for a new lawn, to fill the empty patches, or to add more greenery to the garden with thickness.
However, the seeding methods for every type of lawn are different. However, professionals, with their expertise, can handle lawns of every type. The most common technique is just sowing the grass seeds over the existing lawn grass.
7. Yard Clean Up
You can say goodbye to debris, dry leaves, and Gross Gutters with professional yard cleanup services. The experts remove all the dirt in the yard and expect a lusher green lawn in a few hours of service.
Yard clean-up activities are vital for grass growth. Furthermore, lawn cleaning provides the property with a fresh and beautiful appearance.
8. Leaf Removal
Leaf removal is hasty but also fun when you get to use the leaf blowers, which are either electrically or gas-powered. This is a daily activity; major firms provide professional leaf removal services to revive your lawns beautifully. Use cost-effective traditional leaf removal tools if you are on a tight budget.
9. Gutter Cleaning
Gutter Cleaning is cleaning all kinds of debris built up in the gutters. The clean-up process ensures that the water flow in the pipe remains strong, which the debris prevents.
Gutter cleaning services cost is based on the cleaning area, which is measured in square feet. The average cost ranges between $160 and $270.
10. Mulching
In mulching, the mulch covers the soil. The mulching process involves covering the ground or solid to create a favorable condition for plants or grass to grow effectively. With this process, the people ensure efficient crop development and production.
You can hire four types of mulching services: stubble, plastic mulching, straw mulching, and vertical mulching. Hence, you will get increased production with less effort.
11. Sodding
If you want a full-grown lawn prepared in no time, then you are looking for sodding services. Sodding is a technique to install small or large matured grass patches on the ground for a faster growth rate. It’s just like transplanting grass with its roots to another ground or soil.
This process not only helps us build a new lawn faster but also enables us to repair existing damaged gardens.
What is the Difference Between Softscape and Hardscape?
Landscape design is divided into two parts: Softscape and Hardscape. In simple terms, your outdoor living space needs two kinds of landscaping services to modify: Softscaping and Hardscaping. Different types of lawn elements fall under both these terms, and they are opposite.
As the name sounds, Hardscape includes all the hard stuff on your lawn, like concrete, stone paths, water structures, etc. On the other hand, softscape materials include plants, grass, flowers, shrubs, etc.
The second major difference between these two categories is that the elements of softscape are living, while those of hardscape are non-living.
So, an ideal landscape environment has the proper balance of the materials falling under these two categories. Without the balance, your lawn’s landscape will lose its beautiful touch.
For example, if you have more softscape elements in your lawn, it will look like a jungle, and then it will be fixed by introducing some hardscaping elements like a stone path or concrete structure.
Make your outdoor space worth living in
1. Add Some Mulch Beds
Dead plant materials are used to make mulches. They are the most cost-effective way to make your lawn more intriguing.
On average, 3 cubic yards of mulching can cost you around $274, but you can save it yourself. And you can’t even imagine how much of a discount you will get by doing it alone.
Mulch, a layer of dead plant material on your soil, cannot only be used for looking good. It also promotes faster and healthier grass growth by surrounding it with moisture and allowing it to nourish itself properly.
2. You Can Plant Perennials
Perennials are the type of flora that you can buy and plant once and enjoy its beauty year after year. This is the unique trait of Perennial flowers and plants.
Although you will save a lot of money, planting seedlings or blooming flowers will still cost you an upfront amount. But when they grow and bloom, you will feel a pleasant vibe on your lawn with various colorful options.
3. Revamping an Existing Patio
If your lawn already has a patio, you can maximize or boost its beauty by adding more greenery. By adding a little planned landscape buffer, you can enhance the visual influence of your lawn. The patio minimizes the space of your garden, and less softscaping materials can make it a little boring.
So, how will you do it? Just add some mulch. It’s simple. Fill the surrounding with mulch, they are not so expensive and aren’t required to be replaced on a regular basis.
4. Take the Help of Xeriscaping
Xeriscaping is a type of landscaping that focuses on creating a sustainable and low-water-use environment, particularly in dry regions.
Xeriscaping involves using plants that require minimal watering and implementing techniques to reduce water usage in the landscape. Here are some of the Xeriscaping Elements:
Drought-tolerant plants require very little water and can thrive in hot and dry climates. Drought-tolerant plants include succulents, cacti, agave, yucca, lavender, and sage.
Mulch: Mulch covers the soil around plants to help retain moisture, prevent weed growth, and regulate soil temperature. Common types of mulch used in xeriscaping include gravel, rocks, wood chips, and recycled rubber.
Hardscaping: Hardscaping refers to using non-living materials such as stone, brick, or concrete to create functional and aesthetic features in a landscape, such as walkways, patios, and retaining walls. Hardscaping reduces the amount of water needed for the landscape and can also provide shade and wind protection.
5. Take the Help of Native Plants
Try doing some research about the native plants that grow on their own in your area. They don’t require much watering and care because the environment is highly favorable for them to grow without help.
Native plants will not only add some beauty to your lawn, but they will also save you money. For scientific proof, expats say that native plants are naturally compatible with that particular region’s rainfall and climate conditions.
6. Make Vines Grow on Walls
Growing colorful vines on the walls, stones, or sculptures made of wood that are a part of your landscape will be a great idea. These areas cannot grow greenery by themselves because of the lack of soil fertility. So, you can use colorful vines to make your lawn look beautiful.
However, growing vines can be challenging, as they need assistance until they grow. You will have to give support and direction to the vines so that they can grow however you want.
What can you expect to pay for a Softscaping job at your home?
When renovating your lawn, you must have many questions about the total cost it bears. Out of all the most essential queries, you must ask everyone- What is the price of soft scaping?
What Will be the Average Cost?
First you should learn that softscaping and its total cost is not the same for every lawn, it varies greatly on the structure and other resistant factors.
For example, a homeowner in Toronto spends between $1,809 and $6,901 to avail of a customized softscaping project for his or her lawn. Also, this cost can be as high as $17,204 approximately for an entire softscaping and hardscaping project for a lawn combined.
Factors that Make Up These Costs:
See, if you are checking out your neighbor getting his lawn remodified at a specific budget-friendly cost. Then, you must know that the same will not happen to you.
Softscaping projects differ for everyone, depending on their lawn size, modification goals, and needs. So, below are the unique factors that determine your budget for Softscaping:
1. Lawn Size
It’s one of the major factors because the cost of a Softscaping project for your lawn can be directly affected. Your yard or lawn’s size and shape will be considered a direct cost-affecting element because they increase or decrease the quantity of materials and labor needed to modify your lawn.
If the estimated budget surpasses your pocket capability, you can work with professionals to rejuvenate your lawn effectively at minimum expense. In a self-working scenario, you cannot decide upon such factors efficiently, but professionals are trained for it.
2. Location of the Lawn
If your lawn is near a pond or a lake, softscaping will cost you more than in other areas. Professionals must take direct measures to prevent flooding from getting to your plants, ultimately destroying them.
Softscapes and Technology
Though softscape requires intricate knowledge and requires landscape experts for a beautiful combination of softscape and landscape, there are many new technological innovations.
These advancements help landscapers design, plan, and finally build something that leaves people in awe and sometimes envy.
This section covers software for landscape designs, garden planning, and irrigation planning. It also contains calculators that landscapers generally use for costs and estimation and equipment that makes their work easy.
1. Popular Software for Softscaping
Multiple software and apps on the market help landscapers and homeowners plan their softscapes. For simplicity, these are categorized as:
landscape design software, garden planning software, and irrigation software.
Note: We have not reviewed the apps listed below. They are the most common names in the industry. Please make an informed choice before buying any of these.
1.1 Landscape Design Software
Landscape design software helps teams collaborate on scale, save costs surveying the actual site, and run multiple iterations before going ahead with the design.
These also help homeowners by saving time in decision-making and having a first-hand idea of how it’s all going to come together. However, the software available for this purpose is mainly suited to landscaping professionals.
Some popular landscape design software are:
- AutoCAD with Sketch 3D suite
- VizTerra for 3D rendering
- RealTime Landscaping
- Smart Draw.
- iScape
1.2 Landscaping Planning Software
Garden planning software helps landscapers plan their softscaping projects. This software may include multiple tools such as invoice generation, estimating or job costing, worker scheduling, and expense management capabilities, to name a few.
Since this planning software focuses more on supporting business processes, it offers integrations with other landscaping software as a value-added feature.
Some of the popular landscape planning software are:
- Jobber
- Arborgold
- Lawn Pro
- LMN
- Yardbook
1.3 Irrigation Management Software for Landscaping
Irrigation management software includes irrigation controllers, innovative sprinkler systems, watering schedulers, and more.
These help manage every part of the irrigation for your softscape and take up burdensome tasks requiring intermediate monitoring. Additionally, they help with irrigation audits to keep your lawn lush and green.
The technology surrounding irrigation management software has evolved dramatically during the past couple of years. These systems can detect air temperature, maintain uniform humidity, and even act based on rain forecasts.
They can be easily controlled and managed by homeowners using their smart devices, either at home or from a distant place.
Note that these need to be coupled with specific hardware that they are compatible with.
Some of the popular irrigation management software are:
- IrriRT
- IRRICAD™ for commercial irrigation designs
- Rachio
- Orbit B
2. Softscapes Calculators
Softscaping calculators can help a homeowner on two levels. First, these can help you get an estimate of a job. Second, the calculators can help you with measurements and quantities required if you want to get the materials yourself.
Note that prices vary significantly for every province, and the actual prices differ based on the negotiation and competition prevalent in that region. The cost of softscaping jobs in Alberta is the lowest because the number of companies serving the region is much higher than in Ontario and Quebec.
Instead of discussing how these work, we have mentioned some resources. You can use these calculators to get an estimate or plan materials for the next softscaping job on your outdoor living space. These resources also have conversion tables and other information about the quantity of materials you might need for a particular job. The only requirement is to know your softscaping area’s approximate dimensions.
- Garden Calculator: number of plants required for cubic yards of space, Seed coverage, Ground coverage, water requirements, and more.
- InchCalculator’s Lawn and Landscape calculator has multiple calculators for quantities of mulch, gravel, elevation, pavers, plants, and flowers.
