Turf and putting greens in Harvest.

The rest of a front yard may be rock mulch with trees, flowers and shrubs. The curbside strip is the builder’s to plant, with at least 1 shrub and 2 ornamental grasses for every 10 feet of street frontage.

Read in full on September 26, 2026, the Declaration, the 2021 supplement that brought Harvest Ridge South in and the 2022 amendment contain no mention of artificial turf, synthetic grass or putting greens. Whether a synthetic lawn counts toward the 30%, or falls under the curbside ban, depends on how the Architectural Review Committee reads Section 2.19; ask it in writing before you design a front yard around turf.

The back yard carries no lawn quota. What it does carry is a planting count along the house, 8 plants per 40 linear feet of rear foundation, and an irrigation rule: spray heads serve only lawn or groundcover, and every other planting gets drip, bubbler or subsurface lines.

Section 5.03 gives the Architectural Review Committee sole authority over any material change to a lot and lists the planting of lawns among them. No work starts before it approves, and only a written approval counts. For as long as the developer, HT Land Partners, owns any part of Harvest, it serves as that committee, unless it records an earlier end to that role.

The committee has 30 days from receiving everything it asked for. Plans it has neither approved nor disapproved by then are deemed disapproved as submitted, so silence is a no. It may refuse on purely aesthetic grounds and may attach changes to a yes.

An approval lapses if work hasn’t started within one year, and the work must be finished within one year of starting. The committee can hand an application to a landscape architect or other professional at the owner’s cost, and the Board sets any filing fee.

The Declaration’s checklist for landscape plans wants a written and graphic scale, a north arrow, the house, decks, patios, fences and lot lines, every existing or proposed landscape element and light, specifications and a picture of any large feature, grading and drainage, a table of required against provided trees and plantings, and the type, size and color of any mulch or rock. The request goes in writing with two complete sets of plans.

On a new build, the builder’s application makes the backyard landscape plan due when the home is finished and the certificate of occupancy is in, showing the square footage of irrigated and non-irrigated ground. That plan is the place to draw a green. Later changes go on the ancillary modification form, which asks for a diagram of the location and notes that association approval is not a building permit.

Appendix A, the Declaration’s illustrated list of encouraged and discouraged architecture, gives rear outdoor living a page of its own. It encourages patio and seating that extend past the house, covered patios with wood columns, an outdoor kitchen, rock landscaped steps, walkout patios and rock that carries a change in grade. On lots backing north it highly encourages a detailed rear, to keep curb appeal from the street.

Houses follow a Modern Farmhouse style with Modern Mountain accents, in subdued colors that blend with the landscape and with brick or stone on the front, which gives a backyard its material cues. The Declaration lists 31 lots in Harvest Ridge North, one in Johnson Subdivision Filing 2 and 65 planned in Harvest Ridge South; they run 0.22 to 0.35 acres, and houses sit at least 10 feet from each side line.

The same Declaration keeps play structures out of front and side yards and no taller than 15 feet, screens pools and hot tubs from neighbors and the street, wants water features filtered and sized to keep noise from next door, and asks that light sources not show off the lot where practicable, which bears on a lit green.

The preliminary study for Harvest Ridge South describes a roughly 30-acre farm field between Berthoud Parkway and Highway 287, draining poor to fair toward the Little Thompson River about a quarter mile south. Its borings found sandy lean clay and lean clay with sand to about 15 feet, with low expansive potential and low load-bearing capability.

It warns that perched groundwater may develop once landscaping and irrigation go in, because the clay is relatively impermeable and tends to trap water, and it asks for sprinklers to stay at least 5 feet from foundation walls, with the ground sloping away from the house. Under turf or a green, that points to a base graded to carry water away from the walls to somewhere it can leave, not one that pools on the clay.

The study covers Harvest Ridge South only and left lot-by-lot criteria to later explorations. Colorado requires the builder of a new home to give the buyer a soils report summary at least 14 days before closing; that is the document to read before a base is planned.

A January 2022 amendment rewrote the fence section: every fence 5 feet high, wood-grain concrete or a similar material dyed a natural tan, in a split-rail style, apart from the privacy fencing along Berthoud Parkway and the south edge of Harvest Ridge South. The community website’s fencing page still shows 5-foot Bufftech in Weathered Blend and a Big Rail 4-rail horse fence as approved. The two conflict. It depends on which one the Architectural Review Committee applies, so ask it before a fence line is drawn around a green.

The shared ground is native grass by design. The HOA’s landscaping page says those grasses are trimmed a few times a year and conserve water, and that replacing them with sod would nearly double HOA fees. Harvest is not part of a metropolitan district, so no district design review sits on top of the association’s committee.