Regular Landscape Maintenance Keeps Your Home’s Yard Beautiful
No matter the season, there’s always some landscape maintenance needed to keep your yard looking beautiful. At Landscape East & West, we work year-round pruning, mowing, mulching, and much more to ensure your landscape is healthy and thriving. Once you sign on with us, you will have a dedicated account manager who will ensure monthly assessments of your property are completed to stem problems before they start, maintain that curb appeal, and make sure your investment is protected. This is part of our residential maintenance plan because we know that healthy flora and fauna require some regular care.
As we round out the summer and head into fall, now is a good time to tackle outdoor work to clean up the deadheads from summer, and prepare your lawn and garden for cooler and wetter days.
Lawn Care
Sorry, it’s not time to put the mower away just yet. In the Pacific Northwest lawns should be mowed until the grass stops growing which is around the time of the first frost. As the temperatures cool, aim to keep your grass at about a 2 or 2 ½ inch height, short enough to resist disease, but also able to withstand cooler days and nights. Irrigation is essential right now to keep your lawn hydrated but not saturated in these last hot days. Lawns need about an inch of water each week. Dethatch and aerate your lawn to prepare the ground for the rainy season. And don’t forget to feed your lawn, preferably with a natural or organic fertilizer that won’t wash away in the rain. If some areas of your grass have died off and left bald spots, fall is a good time to overseed and have new grass take root over the winter.
Plant & Soil Health
If you’re feeling a bit unsure about the care to provide to your lawn and garden, we’re happy to help. Our residential maintenance service includes a soil assessment to ensure the right combination of nutrients is provided at the right time. Below ground health is just as important as above ground. We like to incorporate organic materials into the soil because we’ve seen how composting and mulching can really help plant beds thrive. Above ground, landscape beds need regular weeding and watering, but there’s more to maintenance. No one likes to talk about diseases and pests, but new varieties seem to spring up in Oregon each year. Whether you see visible signs of problems or not, we can assess your plants and offer solutions to help them thrive. We choose Organic Materials Review Institute (OMRI)-listed products and sustainable practices to minimize the use of chemicals to maintain optimal plant health. We have green thumbs in every sense of the word!
Prune
Part of keeping a great landscape, just like a great haircut, is to keep it well-trimmed. Bed edges should be trimmed to preserve their shape and prevent lawn creep. Ornamental flowers, plants, and shrubs need pruning to keep them healthy and looking good. As part of our maintenance service, Landscape East & West removes dead, broken, and diseased branches, makes cuts to improve the visual appearance of trees and shrubs, and cuts back plants to keep walkways clear. All that summertime sun can leave landscapes looking like jungles, and for the health of the plants and to keep that aesthetic appeal, shrub and tree pruning is crucial.
Plant & Fertilize
At the same time, there are plants that need regular doses of nutrients from fertilizers and foods to promote growth and prevent pests and disease. And if that mulch you put down in the spring is looking a bit sparse, this is a good time to add more to maintain moisture and protect your garden during temperature extremes.
Late summer into fall is actually a good time for lots of planting. Of course, planting spring bulbs like daffodils and tulips should be done in the early fall, but shrubs and small trees can also be added and give your yard a bit of a fall refresh. If perennials are growing wild, they can be divided and replanted to prevent overcrowding and give the new plantings time to re-root over the winter and prepare for their spring debut. When you’re choosing what to plant, we recommend choosing native and disease and pest-resistant varieties where possible to minimize the risk of problems and also the care required. If a plant has always done well in Oregon’s climate without much assistance, it should continue to do so in your yard and that’s a good thing.
Irrigation
No garden could survive without water. Our residential irrigation service includes everything from new system design and installation to monitoring and adjustments, to backflow testing and winterization. Landscape East & West promotes water-wise landscaping, like grouping together plants that have similar water needs or using native and drought-resistant plants, to minimize the need for extensive irrigation, but there are times, yes summer, when no matter what you’ve planted, watering is critical.
We help make irrigation simple with satellite-based wifi irrigation controllers that adjust the amount of water needed based on the weather. No more will sprinklers be dancing during a rainstorm! Our systems can be newly installed or added as an upgrade to many existing systems.
Professional Landscaping
A final thought on landscape maintenance is to not neglect care for those hardscapes, water features, and even your lighting. Although they are not living parts of your yard, outdoor kitchens, fountains, firepits, ponds, and even lighting needs some regular TLC to keep them operating efficiently and looking good. Regular inspections and cleaning go a long way. If your water feature starts forming excessive algae or your pergola could use some sanding, we can help.
Garden maintenance is a balancing act of knowing just how much to cut, how much to feed, and how much to water. Unless you have a pretty spectacular green thumb, it’s a good idea to at least bring in a professional landscaper once or twice a year for an evaluation and consultation, and you should consider signing on for a regular landscape maintenance plan. At Landscape East & West, we recommend weekly upkeep to squash potential issues before they become big problems, keep everything growing as it should, and assure you have a landscape to be proud of.
When you work with Landscape East & West, you’re working with an all-in-one company. Our designers and installers are in-house and work right alongside our maintenance teams, so everyone knows the vision for your landscape and how to retain that look. There’s no size project that we can’t handle so if your tiny backyard needs a refresh or your apartment complex needs a new design, contact us.
