Landscaping in San Jose, CA

In heavy clay this is also where you find out what you are actually working with. Clay that gets worked wet turns to a compacted, airless mess that nothing will root into, so timing matters, and there is a real argument for keeping earthwork out of the middle of a wet week. Where grade alone cannot move the water, a collection system goes in. That usually means some combination of area drains at low points, a French drain, which is a perforated pipe bedded in washed rock and wrapped in filter fabric so the surrounding soil does not silt it up, and a channel drain across a garage apron or the downhill edge of a patio.

The part that gets ignored on cheap bids is the outlet. A drain line has to end somewhere legal and lower than where it started, whether that is a curb outlet at the street or another approved discharge point. A dry well dug into clay is not a drain, it is a bucket, and it fills. Discharging onto a neighbor's lot is not a solution either, and it is the kind of shortcut that turns into a dispute years later.

Hardscape follows the earthwork, and the base is the whole job. For pavers, that is excavation to a subgrade that has been compacted, crushed aggregate placed and compacted in lifts, a thin screeded bedding course, then the pavers, then an edge restraint and joint sand. For poured concrete, it is a compacted base, the right slab thickness for what will sit on it, reinforcement, control joints cut or tooled at sensible spacing so the slab cracks where you told it to instead of where it feels like it, and an isolation joint where the slab meets the house so the two can move independently.

Stone can be dry laid on base or set on a mortar bed over a slab, and those two builds age very differently, so it is worth knowing which one you are buying. Retaining walls are their own decision. Anything holding back soil has to deal with the water in that soil, so the back of the wall gets drain rock, a perforated collector pipe with a real outlet, and filter fabric between the rock and the native soil.

Segmental block walls above a certain height need geogrid reinforcement laid back into the retained soil in courses as the wall is built, which is why a wall cannot be made taller later by adding a course on top. Wall height and whether anything sits above the wall, a driveway, a slope, a structure, decide whether the wall needs engineering. Many California jurisdictions exempt low retaining walls, commonly measured from the bottom of the footing to the top of the wall, from a building permit, and remove that exemption once the wall supports a surcharge.

The threshold and the exceptions are set locally, so the building department for your address is where it gets confirmed. A rule of thumb off a national website will not tell you. Irrigation goes in before the soil is finished and the plants arrive. The mainline and valves get laid out with the zones already decided, sleeves get run under any paving that has not been built yet, and the drip and spray circuits are kept separate because they apply water at completely different rates.

Drip needs its own pressure regulation and filtration. Spray needs head-to-head coverage or you get the dry rings that homeowners try to fix by running the whole zone longer, which just floods everything else. A weather-based controller is worth the money here, and on landscape work tied to a building permit California's water efficient landscape rules may require one along with other documentation. The applicable ordinance is your city's or the county's own version, which is adopted locally and can be stricter than the state model, so the threshold that triggers it should be checked for your address and your scope.

Soil preparation is where a lot of money gets wasted on the wrong thing. Heavy clay does not get fixed by tipping bagged amendment into each planting hole. That builds a soft, water-holding pocket inside a dense material, and the pocket behaves like a bathtub with the plant sitting in it. The approach that works is broad rather than local: amend and decompact across the whole bed, raise beds or build mounds where drainage is poor so root crowns sit above the water, and choose plants that tolerate the soil you actually have.

Backfill around a root ball is usually better as the native soil it came out of, with the amendment worked into the wider area. Then the planting. San Jose gets essentially no rain between late spring and the first storms of the following autumn, so the plant list has to be honest about a long dry season. California natives and Mediterranean species handle that well, which is why manzanita, ceanothus, sages, lavender, rosemary and the ornamental grasses turn up on so many local plans.

The important detail with the natives is what happens after year one. Most of them want regular water while they establish and then want to be left alone, and summer irrigation into an established manzanita or ceanothus is one of the reliable ways to kill it. That is a zoning decision, which is why it belongs in the irrigation layout rather than in a maintenance note nobody reads. Gophers are a real factor in this valley, and wire baskets at planting time are cheaper than replacing a specimen tree.

Mulch goes on at a couple of inches, pulled back off trunks and crowns, and it does more for water retention and weed suppression than most of the products sold to do the same job. Lighting and finish work close it out. Low-voltage landscape lighting runs off a transformer sized for the load with voltage drop accounted for across the run, which is why the far end of a long circuit goes dim on systems that were laid out by eye.

Fixtures get placed for what they light rather than for how they look in daylight. Any line-voltage work, a new circuit, a panel change, an outdoor outlet, is electrical work and falls outside a general building classification, so it goes to a licensed electrical contractor. That is worth knowing when you compare bids, because a bid that quietly includes electrical without saying who is doing it is telling you something.