According to ameijers :

"Chris Lewis" wrote in message
...
Plant trees. Less effort in the long run, far more effective
in producing privacy (and sound deadening).

[10 acres, less than 1/4 acre needs to be mowed.]
That is what my retirement house is gonna be- not visible from the the road.
Only lawn will be a small patch up at the road so you can non-blindly pull
into traffic, and a firebreak around the house, so the place gets enough
sunlight to not go moldy on me. (Houses that never see sunlight always reek
like a cabin, in my experience....) But I'll look for a place where the
trees are already there- with my non-green thumb, trying to keep plants
alive is expensive, pointless, and downright depressing....

For some strange reason, cutting down everything on the property
is a rather common trait in home building. Then you have to buy
back your own topsoil...

It's a good idea to consider "filling in" gaps etc., as part
of good management practises.

If you can find a source of seedling trees (eg: a reforestation
nursery), particularly conifers, you can plant a lot for cheap,
and they usually require _no_ maintenance.

Back in '93, we bought 250 white pines for about $50 and planted
them ourselves. Now some of them are 30', we've had 5% failure,
and we haven't done a _thing_ to maintain them.

Back in 2000 we did it again with about 600 trees (white pine,
red pine, red oak and some shrubs) - about $170 worth of trees
and another $150 worth of teenage labor ;-)

[An experienced seedling planter can do well over 100 trees
an hour - in fact, a _good_ one up to about 400/hour depending
on site conditions.]

Deciduous trees need a bit of assistance, and as a result of not
giving them very much, they didn't do that well (70% failure
rate is not considered unusual). But the pines are doing
extremely well (10% loss).

[The nursery used to be an arm of the provincial government, which
was subsequently "sold" to the employees, and now they run it.
They'll even send someone out to help you plan out what/how much
to buy.]
--
Chris Lewis, Una confibula non set est
It's not just anyone who gets a Starship Cruiser class named after them.