Mary Beth H. :                   This is Mary Beth Harrison with Dallas Native Voice and today I have Bram with Roundtree Landscaping with me. And this is another good topic because I love the outdoors. I would be outdoors all the time if I could. So you’re going to talk about outdoor living, how do we make that available in our home?

Bram Franklin:                   Well, the interesting thing is that a lot of people want to be outdoors and some other people want to be indoors 365 days of the year. We have TVs, we have fireplaces, we have the landscape. There’s water features, there’s things that affect all of our emotions. So if you’re indoors in a home that has lots of glass and you’re looking out here where it’s totally screened of from all the other homes, from the landscaping, the walls have all provided that. So what we try to do is we look at the whole perspective. We look at the whole property of how people want to live, how they enjoy their lives, how they want to spend their weekends and their free time. And if we can bring them outside, we can make them enjoy every bit of it. Everything from the plants to the way that even the birds and the bees come around. It makes our lives happier.

Mary Beth H. :                   Well, I know that in Dallas you can be outside almost what, eight months out of the year. Sometimes, unfortunately, 12 months out of the year. And be perfectly comfortable out here. So if you have a little bit of cover to it, then you’ve knocked out the sun issue. As you said, you can bring a TV out here. I mean, what’s better than watching a Cowboy game on the TV screen, right? And then you’ve got a fire pit when it gets cold. There’s just so much you’ve got going on here. I mean, I would be happy out here.

Bram Franklin:                   We look at people’s sensitivities to whether they like the hot, they like the cold, what we can do to bring them outdoors. So we look at weather, where the sun’s coming from, what direction the wind is coming from, what direction the house is turned, whether a house has West facing areas where the hot sun comes in. Or maybe they like the East sun coming up in the morning and they want a patio to have coffee on in the morning. We look at the whole perspective and we ask people about their lifestyle and how we can make something that works just for them.

Mary Beth H. :                   So talk to me about those pesky bugs because we know we’ve got them whether we want to admit it or not. It’s a problem. So what do we do about that?

Bram Franklin:                   Well we watch how we water and if we water down low as opposed to over the top of everything, if we make sure that we limit the amount of ground timber we have where they can live inside of that, and then there are some organic ways of taking care of the insects. The truth of the matter is some of those insects interplay with all the other insects and the microbes in the soil and it’s a whole big organic cosmos. But the truth of the matter is there are ways that we can handle it design wise, to lessen the amount of insects. We can raise some of the tree canopies to get more air flow.

Mary Beth H. :                   Okay, good to know that there’s ways to do it without throwing chemicals in our lives.

Bram Franklin:                   And we’d rather do it that way.

Mary Beth H. :                   Yeah, absolutely and that’s really good to hear because that is an issue of kind of melding the best of both. And like you say, you get rid of one bug, you think, “Oh, let’s just get rid of mosquitoes. We don’t ever want those in our lives,” or, “We don’t ever want…” It messes up with everything else.

Bram Franklin:                   Correct.

Mary Beth H. :                   Because mosquitoes have their place in life.

Bram Franklin:                   Mosquitoes and ants are two of the bigger things.

Mary Beth H. :                   Right. And so yeah, we get rid of one which just messes up everything. So things weren’t randomly put on this Earth. They were there for a reason and then while it annoys us, you get rid of them and that’s a problem too. That is really an interesting topic. I mean, he doesn’t want outdoor living? It’s just the way we live now. So thanks for listening. You can go to Dallasnative.com and learn more. Always go to Roundtree Landscaping and learn a whole lot about outdoors, and we go where you go. You can find us on all social media. Thanks for listening.