Most home-owners are led to believe grass is the only option for their yard, but the Arizona sun is brutal on grass lawns — and torturous on pocketbooks. The truth is that your yard can be both beautiful and budget-friendly when you stop seeing green and start hauling rock.
Because the world of landscape design has bloomed in recent years, you can banish the image of a barren wasteland of rock and re-imagine a place infused with creativity and majestic features alive with color.
With a beautiful rock landscape, you can cast your maintenance worries to the wind and spend your time and hard-earned money enjoying your yard.
How Much Money Do You Save with Rock vs. Grass?
Consider the staggering cost of keeping your grass alive. By mid-spring, temperatures in the East Valley begin to rise to 85 or 95 degrees and reach about 110 degrees once summer hits. At the height of the season, the heat is enough to scorch most lawns.
So lawn owners either put their yards on life support with massive water overloads or let them die and suffer the ugly brown consequences until late fall or early winter, when they start to turn green again.
This dilemma is not limited to just the cost of water or plummeting curb appeal; too much water can also harm a lawn, and who has time to hassle with all the upkeep?
That’s why many yard lovers turn to outside help to keep their yards fresh. However, some companies charge an estimated $25 a week just to cut your grass, nothing else included. That $25 a week is $100 a month and adds up to $1,200 a year. Any other service just multiplies the pocketbook pain. There’s the costs of spraying for weeds, fertilizing, spraying for insects and pests, dealing with plant diseases, and reviving your lawn with an occasional reseeding.
Regardless of whether you’re maintaining your lawn on a shoestring budget or a dedicated outside service, it’s going to run you at least a couple hundred dollars and as much as a couple thousand — year after year after year.
A yard landscaped with rock, on the other hand, saves you hours of labor and hundreds or thousands of dollars every year, and even the up-front investment provides more bang for your buck. For approximately $40, you can spread a mere 10-pound bag of grass seed or a massive 1-ton delivery of rock.
After initial landscaping, your rock yard is practically maintenance-free. When rocks are installed, your lawn is stripped of all its grass, weeds, and roots down to the underlying dirt. From there, your preferred variety of rocks or mulch is laid down. AZ Rock Express offers an extensive selection of rock in nearly every imaginable size, shape, pattern, and color — from landscaping rock to decorative gravel, river rock, pea gravel, sand, and more. Your landscape design can take on whatever style or statement you want to make.
And all of it is high-quality, natural Arizona landscape rock. Without the need for water and lawn mower gas, landscape rock is the more sustainable choice. For years after switching to a rock yard, the most maintenance that’s needed is an occasional weeding and the addition of more rocks about every seven years. A lawn that is properly dealt with during the transition from grass to rock shouldn’t typically have as many issues with weeds because the ground receives a complete de-weeding before new rocks are laid down, but the forces of nature will eventually introduce weeds back in among the rocks. Nevertheless, the amount of work required is a far cry from the hours of mowing and maintaining grass.
The bottom line is that in Arizona, the cost of keeping grass like the your neighbor’s law you look up to can be staggering — and never-ending — but rock can provide the foundation for an attractive, low-maintenance, and money-saving yard that is a unique reflection of your style and circumstances.
Instead of continuing to drive your limited financial resources into the dirt or risking a grass lawn that turns lifeless and uninviting, see what a professional landscape design can deliver for you. Get to know Arizona’s one-stop shop for landscape design, delivery, installation, and maintenance by calling (480) 252-9786 or visiting AZ Rock Express today.
If you love grass, here are some tips from the City of Chandler regarding lawn care in the Desert – view the pdf file.