Spring is coming, which everyone knows means that landscaping and gardening season is almost upon us. Whether you’ve already made a plan with a landscape designer, or you’re maintaining your established landscape, there are somethings to do now to prepare for a successful and productive landscaping season.
If you’re adding or removing elements for your current layout, it’ll certainly help if your grounds are well tended before you start. You don’t want to remove a flower bed that has no clear beginning and end. And it’s no fun to put a bench under a tree that doesn’t shade it after you prune it.
Do these simple tasks to prepare you for upcoming landscape planning, or just to maintain your current landscape.
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Clean Up Winter Messes
The cold season often means we aren’t outside enjoying the landscape. As a consequence, when a piece of litter blows into the yard or a branch falls, no one picks it up. Go ahead and walk your grounds for litter, dead plant matter, messes left my animals, and more. Clean up any untidiness that happened in the cold months.
Get Out the Rake
Even after you’ve picked up any trash and debris, there’s probably leaf litter from the fall still on the ground. Rake it up, being sure to catch small twigs, pinecones, acorns, and all the other little things sitting on your lawn. This will re-expose your hidden grass to sunlight, helping it start a new growing season.
Dormant Pruning
The right time to prune in now! You want to prune your trees while they’re dormant, for many reasons. This decreases the risk of enabling parasites or infections to prosper, and removes parts of the tree that aren’t doing well before the spring growth spurt- so your tree doesn’t have to spend energy trying to heal or save those areas. If you’re not sure how to prune, call a professional arborist.
Refine Your Edging
The edges between lawn and plantings tend to blur over the cold months. Plants may have creeped over to where they don’t belong, or mulch may have migrated into the lawn. Redefine those edges, they’re what keeps the order in your landscape. The only edges you don’t want to clean up are the ones that your landscape planning will be eliminating. Even then, you’ll still want to rake mulch out of grass and reign in out of control plants where needed.
Refresh Your Mulch
For those planted areas that won’t be going away soon, early spring’s the time to remove old mulch and apply new. Replacing mulch instead of piling new mulch on top of old is important. There is such thing as too much mulch, and mulch that has lost its ability to absorb and release water at helpful rates, due to changes in texture as it breaks down. Do wait until your annual plantings sprout, so that you can be sure where they are today, and not damage them.
Apply Fertilizer
As landscaping season approaches, your landscape planning should include keeping the plants you already have alive and well, if you foresee them as part of your future landscape. With that in mind, use early spring to fertilize your lawn and plantings. This can save you from having to reseed your lawn or replace plants that aren’t healthy, by fortifying the grass and plantings you already have.
Doing these bits of preparation for the coming season can set you up for the best possible outcomes. Whether embarking on realizing your scheduled landscape planning this year, or keeping your current landscape fresh, these simple tasks will help you out.