FRANK OTTE NURSERY

• In June, the assistant manager, Jesse, came out to my house and listened to some ideas I had for landscaping and gave input too. She took notes and then in a few weeks mailed me several detailed estimates of various beds we talked about and gave drawings of them as well. I quite liked the estimate because they were detailed with all the material and plants needed with unit costs and totals. This way I knew exactly what was going to happen and could ask questions about things I would not necessarily have thought about. The drawings must take her a lot of time to do, they are detailed, color coded for the plant flower color and very neat. They are on graph paper and drawn to scale, which is helpful. She also made separate estimates and drawings for each large bed, so I could plan the work in stages.

I knew I wanted to plant in the fall (best for plants) so over the summer, I shopped there, tweaked their design here and there and went in and asked for plant substitutions ideas. This was my first landscaping project and I am not familiar with a lot of plants, so I labored over some decisions and asked a lot of questions and to her credit she always was patient.
When they did the work, I thought the crew worked quickly, left the site clean and were courteous. They blew off the driveway afterward to remove dirt and debris and also remembered to put a tarp under their truck when in my driveway, in case it leaked oil. Although, I found it best to go through Jesse if I needed something adjusted midway, I felt the crew was well aware of the plan and preferred not to have input from me but rather Jesse instead. Also, Jesse was available to me as the wall was going up to make a final decision on the layout and also at planting to get my approval on the layout. One small complaint would be that they forgot to put boards down on the lawn to run their wheel barrow over which we had discussed with Jesse. My husband is very picky about ruts in lawn, however, that is probably a matter of opinion on whether or not the ground was too soft, which they decided it was not. They did not run the Dingo equipment (mini front-end loader) because it would make ruts, so I know they were aware of it at least.