Give Your Lawn a Good Spring Cleanup

Give Your Lawn a Good Spring Cleanup

The first thing most of us want to do when we hear that the warmer weather is coming is to give our homes the spring cleaning they so deserve. The winter can wreak havoc on the inside of your home with all the grime that’s getting tracked in and often causes a buildup of stuff you may have been hoarding without knowing because the weather makes you feel unmotivated to throw anything out. But your lawn? Well, it suffers a similar fate in the winter.

By springtime, most homeowners are left with a yard full of dying plants, dried up grass, or garbage that was buried by the snow or blown in, and disturbed earth everywhere. Whether or not you want to tidy up for yourself or because you’re trying to sell your home, your yard needs some landscape maintenance. Here are just a few ways to get down, dirty, and give your yard a good spring cleanup.

Get Started On Garbage

First things first—tackle the stuff that’s cluttering your lawn. Whether we like it or not, winter and fall bring with them inclement weather that likes to leave our lawns scattered with an assortment of leaves and trash that has blown in or been buried by the snow. Even though you may want to clean this stuff up as soon as you can see it, it’s important to wait until your grass is dry. If you choose to power ahead and rake over wet grass, you can expect that it’ll be uprooted, damaged, and in the end, will cost you to replace with seed.

Take Care Of Any Patchy Grass

Once you’ve cleaned up the garbage and leaves from your yard, you may notice that your grass looks brown and patchy.  An essential part of your landscape cleanup is making sure that the foundation of your lawn, your grass, looks as good as its other elements.

Consider booking a lawn aeration service, use grass seed in areas where the grass has completely withered (this is called over seeding), and look into your irrigation system if you have one to make sure everything is working.  Even though all of these may make your yard look like a Franken-grass, they’re important processes to get started on early in the spring season. If you perform this landscape maintenance early, you can bet that come summertime everything will be beautiful, grown in, and boasting major curb appeal.

Don’t Be A Prude To Pruning

Pruning is one of the biggest advantages you can give your trees and shrubs in your yard cleanup. Even though it seems counterproductive to snip away at growth, doing so will actually help your greenery grow fuller, more evenly, and healthier.

Investigate the areas where your trees and shrubbery have been damaged by the snow, rain, wind, and frost. Next, make sure you prune them until you can see the “live” stems, which are usually green-ish. You don’t want to use an electric pruner if you don’t know what you are doing, since it can often be hard to make precise and targeted cuts with one of those—and pruning is all about doing just that.

The last thing that you want to do is over-prune in some areas while under pruning in others, which often happens with electric shapers (quickly) since your shrubbery will take at least a year to grow back consistent.  You need to know how and where to cut so don’t make a mess of your tree, shrub or hedge.

Take Notice Of Preferred Pruning Heights

Every element of your yard has different needs when it comes to landscape cleanup, especially when pruning is involved. The last thing you want to do is approach every element of your yard with the same mindset and cut everything to the same height.

Ornamental grasses should be cut to roughly 2 inches tall, which can be easily cut by tying the tops of the grasses then snipping. Semi-woody perennials should be cut to about 4 inches tall, and flowering trees like roses should be rid of their damaged and dead stems before they bloom in the summer.

If you have an intricate landscape with many different plant elements it can be confusing and time consuming trying to care for it all.  Forest City Lawn Care provides complete landscape clean up and landscape maintenance services for our clients in the Rockford, Illinois area.

Get Started On The Garden Bed

Your garden beds are arguably one the main focal points of your landscaping, so you should spend a lot of careful time and consideration to make sure that your gardens spring cleanup yields the results you want.  And that is a fantastic looking, healthy, and vibrant garden!

Start by removing any dead annuals or perennials that have run their course.  Next, prune or trim any shrubs or bushes that are touching your home or building. If you’re thinking about moving around any plants into a different arrangement, now’s the time to enact your plan.  Finish up your garden bed cleanup by raking up any leaves or other organic waste that’s clogging the remaining live plants.

After your beds are clean and you’re happy with where your plants are, you can add a fresh layer of topsoil and then mulch the beds for a nice uniform appearance. Once you’ve done all that, your beds will look sharp and have undeniable curb appeal.

Give Your Stones and Patio Some TLC

Stones, patios, and hardscaping areas need just as much of a revamp as greenery does in the springtime landscape maintenance. Consider using a power washer to clean away built-up stains and grime that may have collected on your concrete, pavers, or wood areas. Another good idea is to paint any wood that’s exposed to the outdoors (and needs repainting) like decks, fences, and railings to prevent rotting or aging the wood before its time.

Sweep in any loose gravel that’s escaped from the gaps between your patio stones and buy replacement if needed.  Another method you can take to fill in any potential tripping hazards or gaps is to fill in these areas with polymeric sand, then you lightly water the gaps with a hose, let it set, and the sand will harden.  This will prevent weeds from growing in between the stones and insects from making burrows.

Your spring cleanup doesn’t have to feel like a chore, rather it should feel like an investment you’re taking in your yard to increase your curb appeal for the summer.  Forest City Lawn Care can take the burden off of your shoulders and we can tailor our landscape clean up services to your specific property.  You make a phone call, we do all the work, you happily pay when you see how fantastic your yard looks.

If your property is looking worse for wear after winter, give us a call at 815-200-9608 or fill out our contact form and we’ll provide you with an estimate to whip your property back into a manageable state so it looks fantastic this summer.