Irrigation & Water Management

Kentucky gets about 46 inches of rain a year, delivered with no regard for when the garden wants it. Three weeks of drought in August, four inches in an afternoon in April. The infrastructure that manages both is decided at design time: where the downspouts go, which way the terrace falls, where the swale runs, and how the beds drink in a dry spell.

For irrigation we are drip-first. Water delivered at the root, under the mulch layer, uses roughly half of what spray heads throw into the air and puts none of it on foliage where fungus starts. Lawns get high-efficiency rotary heads where they get anything at all; a well-built tall fescue lawn in this climate should need irrigation help perhaps eight weeks a year. Every system runs on a smart controller with a local weather feed, so it skips the cycle when the sky has done the work.

Drainage is the quieter half of the craft. We build French drains and channel drains where water concentrates, dry creek beds that turn a drainage problem into a garden feature, and rain gardens that hold a storm's first flush in planted basins instead of shipping it to the street. On the limestone slopes around Lexington, getting this wrong shows up as a wet basement; we treat grading as seriously as planting.

Existing systems we audit honestly. Sometimes the answer is a new controller and six repaired heads, not a new system, and we will say so.