Late winter is a good time to plan out easy ways to accomplish maintenance of your landscape. Often, caring for a landscape is repetitious drudgery that you must do in a timely fashion to avoid greater problems. You squeeze in the lawn mowing, weeding or trimming at the end of the day or on the weekend, when you are tired and would rather be doing something else. There is a much more appealing option! Nurture your property in a way that is meaningful, stimulating, healing and even exciting! You can transform the composition and pattern of how you get the work done by outlining how you want to proceed.
Here are some thoughts to help you:
- Design For Low Maintenance: Think about what impedes your progress. If you are tired of all the trimming you have to do after mowing your lawn, begin to simplify your layout. It is possible to create borders that the mower can just glide over.
- Water and Fertilizer Equals More Work: Do you really want to mow your lawn twice a week? High levels of watering and excessive nutrient applications causes spurts of weak plant growth, increased diseases and heightened insect damage. You can save time and money by first observing actual conditions and then deciding if there is a need for additional resources. Established lawns, shrubs, trees and perennials need only small inputs except in severe conditions. You benefit through predictable growth, healthier plants and reduced work for you.
Lots of moving parts! Our shop performs proactive maintenance on our specialty equipment so it’s ready to work in Spring!
- Better Choices: Effortless landscapes can be created through decreased complexity. Intricate landscapes with many uniform features and carefully organized plants requires fastidious and disciplined care to look good. Instead you can use just a few plant species to mass plant areas of your landscape and use ground cover plants to help fill the space. This can give you a clean, casual look that is easy to maintain.
- Stimulate: What awakens your spirit? Maintenance isn’t a bother when your interest is aroused and your mind and body are activated. Is your passion to learn about new plants? Would you like to graze on your landscape while you pull a few weeds? Do sights of butterflies and birds excite you? You can equip your landscape in a way that turns chores into adventures!
- Get It or Fix It: Nothing is worse than having a task to do and finding out that you don’t have the right tools. This is the time of year to get your lawn and garden equipment checked while repair shops are not inundated. Also check out the many new tools available that can dramatically reduce the time and effort like powerful, battery operated weed whips.
Spend some time now assessing your maintenance needs to make your spring work manageable and fun. Write down what you like to do, want to do more of and what you would like to do less. Then plan out how to accomplish your goals because when you master maintenance on your property it does equal joy!