See your lawn and gardens come roaring back to life
Spring is THE time to perform routine lawn care and garden maintenance services in the landscape. Why? Our garden management people would say precisely because your landscape is a garden. And a garden is nature planned, nature composed, and nature tended.
In this article we are going to offer our expert opinion on spring landscape maintenance best practices—to explain what we do and why it matters.
Early Spring Lawn Care and Garden Maintenance - Why It’s Important
For three months the wind and snow and temperatures have had their effect on the landscape. Some plants may not have survived. Some may have experienced winter damage due to irregular temperature changes.
You could skip spring clean up, but then your lawn and gardens won’t come back as quickly and may not fill out as fully as they could.
Giving your lawn and gardens detailed care in the early spring almost guarantees you will see the landscape come roaring back to life at the start of the growing season.
The Essential Early Spring Lawn Care Services
Your lawn maintenance team maintains lawn health by following industry best practices for watering, fertilization, and aeration in the spring and throughout the growing season.
Key lawn care tasks to nurture robust, healthy turf and strengthen disease resistance:
- core cultivation to aerate the soil, reduce compaction, and stimulate root growth
- reseeding to fill in thin spots with a fescue cultivar that is bred for disease resistance to prevent weeds from taking over where grass has thinned out
- moderate fertilization to jump start growth in the early season
- preemergent herbicide treatment to suppress weed seed germination
- deep, infrequent watering in the early morning to fill the gap in any prolonged dry spells
Precise Timing of Grass Seed and Herbicide Treatments
Lawn re-seeding. In late Feb- early March, we broadcast fresh grass seed on thin spots (usually shaded areas, or areas where snow has laid on the lawn for an extended time). This ensures adequate time for the new seed to establish before the warm weather hits.
Weed Control – first preemergent treatment. Once the grass seed has sprouted (it takes about ten days), it is safe to treat the lawn proactively with a preemergent herbicide. This material creates a barrier on the ground that prevents unwanted seeds from germinating.
Forsythia is our indicator plant. When the forsythia bursts into flower, we conduct the first round of preemergent to prevent weed seeds from sprouting in the lawn and planting beds.
There is a window of a few weeks for us to effectively apply this lawn care treatment. Once forsythia starts to leaf out, that’s when crab grass starts to germinate. So we want to have the treatment on the ground just in time for that. Not too soon and not too late.
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The Essential Early Spring Garden Services
- Clean up debris that has collected over winter, cut back grasses and groundcovers before they start to grow. This is to clear the way for new fresh growth.
- Pruning summer blooming shrubs aggressively now so we don’t have to do it midsummer when they are flowering
- Fertilize shrubs, small trees, and perennials to give them the energy and nutrients they need to push new growth
- Mulching provides the finishing touch. A three to four inch covering of mulch retains moisture, provides nutrients to feed the roots, and suppresses weed growth.
Precise Timing of Spring Pruning and Cutbacks
The most important task in the garden services list is timing the spring pruning. We wait until the buds are swollen. That’s when trimming roses will encourage new growth, for example. The same goes for dormant plants and tree pruning—Japanese Maples, Crape Myrtles, etc.
We make our cuts right above the bud. That makes the plant branch out from that point and produce more buds. That’s how we develop a full showy display for you.
Why is spring pruning important?
The purpose of pruning and shaping plants in the spring is to anticipate their desired growth pattern and to direct the plant to fill out in a particular way. Your landscape technician is thinking about what the plant is going to look like two or three months later.
Also, early spring is the time when most flowering plants need cutbacks because they bloom on new growth. There are a few that should be cut back only in the Fall. If you prune them in the wrong season they won’t bloom.
Hydrangea is one of those. There are four different types. Three of them bloom on new wood (so need spring cutbacks) and one blooms on old wood (cut in Fall). So your garden services crew really have to know the difference.
The Essential Late Spring Lawn Care and Garden Services
- 2nd weed control treatment. If we anticipate weed activity, we apply a second preemergent treatment in mid-May to prevent weed seed from germinating in the lawn.
- Pest Control. In late May we may treat to prevent grubs from developing if the property has a history of grub infestations from beetles.
- Disease Control. If the lawn has a history of disease, we treat it with fungicide in late May into June when conditions become favorable to fungal development.
Prioritize Lawn Health for Disease Prevention
Prevention is focused principally on strengthening lawn health in the early spring before we get to those steamy days of midsummer.
When those first warm days invite you to dust off the patio furniture and linger outside, they also invite common fungal diseases to make themselves at home in your lawn. Conditions are prime when night time temperatures remain consistently in excess of 65 degrees. Since fungicides are preventative, they must be in the lawn before these conditions present.
A healthy lawn is better able to fight disease when under stress from sustained high temperatures and humidity. Whereas turf that has not received that TLC early in the year may struggle and potentially succumb.
Note: It would be a mistake to assume that fungal diseases only arise in the prolonged high heat and humidity of midsummer. For example, “dollar spot,” one of the most common and harmful Northern Virginia turfgrass diseases, starts in the first warm moist days of early spring and will surge in the summer. That’s why spring lawn care is the most important part of a turf care program because it has the potential to stop disease before it starts.
Spring Garden Care Makes the Summer Garden Thrive
A small yard landscape doesn’t need premium level maintenance services, or does it?
Every garden needs this level of care—not just high end estates. The level of detail corresponds precisely to the size and complexity of the landscaping.
Lawns and gardens require expert care and attnetion. It’s all about the details. And you want a garden services crew that is “picky”. You want them to do everything possible to make your plants thrive and look their very best all year round.
Do you want landscape maintenance personnel who are detail obsessed working in your garden? If so, contact the garden management team at Surrounds and we’ll talk.
Perhaps you are wondering how to bring out the fullest expression in your landscape and gardens. Our eBook: Choosing the Right Kind of Landscape Maintenance Firm, is full of valuable information to help you understand the fundamental differences between landscape maintenance companies.