Every landscaping quote is built on the same quiet skills: measuring a property accurately, converting square feet into materials, and pricing the work so the business is still standing next season. Nobody teaches this. It gets passed down in trucks, learned through bad bids, and guarded like a family recipe.
The Field Guide is our attempt to write it down properly.
Who's behind it
The Field Guide is published by YardSum, a measurement and estimating tool built in Tampa, Florida. YardSum turns any address into an accurate lawn measurement from satellite imagery, converts it into material quantities — mulch, sod, gravel, pavers — and produces a professional PDF estimate, all in the time it used to take to find the measuring wheel.
We build software for the people who make yards look good, so we spend our days thinking about the math behind their quotes. This blog is where that thinking goes.
What you'll find here
Three kinds of guides, all practical: measuring (how to get accurate square footage without wasting an afternoon), materials (the formulas that turn area into cubic yards, pallets, and tons), and pricing (how to build quotes that win jobs and protect margin). No fluff, no filler — if a guide doesn't help you quote better or faster, we don't publish it.
Our one bias, stated plainly
Yes, we make a measuring tool, and yes, our guides mention it where it genuinely fits. But every formula, chart, and pricing framework here works whether you use YardSum, a measuring wheel, or a tape measure and a notepad. The math is the math. We'd just rather you spend your time on the yard than on the arithmetic.
See what the Field Guide is built on
Measure a lawn from satellite imagery, run the material calculators, and send a branded PDF estimate — free, no card required.
Try YardSum free →Have a topic you want covered, or a pricing question from the field? We read everything sent through yardsum.com.