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This September was hard on North Texas yards. It set heat records across Denton County, and most of the county went from mid-July to the last days of the month without measurable rain. It is also the month when most of the big landscape decisions for the next year get made. Commercial contracts come up for bid, HOA boards set budgets, and homeowners finally sit outside long enough to notice what the yard is missing.

A lot of Lake Dallas went up fast in the early 2000s. Roughly a third of the homes in town were built between 2000 and 2009, which means a lot of front yards were planted by a builder crew around the same time and have not had much done to them since besides fresh mulch every spring. That is not a knock on anybody. Builder landscapes are designed to look good on closing day, and for a while they do. But plants keep growing, trees keep spreading, and twenty years later the ya

If you are on an HOA board in Highland Village, Flower Mound, Argyle or any other area here between Lake Grapevine and Lake Lewisville, you probably did not sign up because you were excited about landscaping. You signed up because somebody had to, and now you are looking at a grounds maintenance line in the budget that is one of the biggest numbers on the page, and you are not entirely sure what is behind it.

Most of my outdoor living calls in Argyle come in right about now. The heat finally breaks, people go sit in their backyard for the first time in three months, and they realize the backyard is not really set up for sitting in. That is a good instinct to follow. Fall and winter are the best months of the year to be outside in North Texas, and if you want a patio you can actually use this season, September is the month to start talking about it. But here is the thing about Arg

If you manage a commercial property in Flower Mound and your landscape contract runs on the calendar year, September is when you should start thinking about it. Not December. Not January, after the current agreement has already rolled over for another twelve months. I get calls every spring from property managers who are frustrated with how their grounds look and want to make a change. By then the window has mostly closed. They are stuck for another season, or they switch

Every year around the end of August the phone starts doing the same thing. Somebody notices one section of the yard going off color while the rest of it looks fine. They go out and watch the controller cycle through, and sure enough, zone four runs for its twelve minutes and nothing comes out of the ground. The first thing most people assume is a leak. Something broke underground, water is going somewhere it shouldn't, and this is going to mean tearing up the lawn.

An outdoor kitchen is one of my favorite projects to build, mostly because it actually gets used once it is done. And here is the thing I try to get across to every customer at the start of a project. This is not a three-month-a-year feature in North Texas. Between mild winters, long falls, and early springs, most of our outdoor kitchens get real use ten or eleven months out of twelve, not just June through August.

In some Highland Village neighborhoods, especially the ones backing up to a trail, pond or the lake, you'll see open wrought iron instead of a solid wood privacy fence. That's a nice look, but it also means your backyard is basically on display to whoeve Clay. Dense, sticky, gray to black clay that turns into concrete in August and soup after a good rain. If you have ever tried to push a shovel into your yard in July and felt it bounce back at you, you already know what

Our team at RD Services has dug a lot of holes in Flower Mound over the years, and I can tell you exactly what you will hit about eight inches down. Clay. Dense, sticky, gray to black clay that turns into concrete in August and soup after a good rain. If you have ever tried to push a shovel into your yard in July and felt it bounce back at you, you already know what I am talking about.

If your yard is looking rough right now, you're not alone. We tend to get more calls around this time of year about brown patches and dying grass than any other time of year, and honestly, most of it isn't your fault.