When it comes to keeping your landscaping looking great, timing is everything. For example, fall is a great time to plant trees. However, it’s a very bad time to prune different shrubs. We don’t want you to wait until spring to find out that all of the landscaping you did in the fall hurt your plants more than it helped them. We’ll fill you in on the five biggest fall landscaping mistakes to avoid.
Mistake One – Let the Leaves Pile Up
Raking is one project that can really put a damper on your landscaping in the fall if you don’t keep on top of it. However, it’s not purely for aesthetics. Raking actually helps keep your lawn healthy. If you leave piles of matted leaves on the lawn all winter, these leaves can stop airflow and suffocate your grass. Also, things like fungal infections and snow mold can start under fallen leaves and fester. In turn, this can kill or severely weaken your grass come spring. You’ll end up with dead, brown patches instead of a lush, green lawn.
Mistake Two – Pruning Boxwood, Spring-Flowering Shrubs, and Yew
Boxwood and yews do take pruning very well, but you should hold off on pruning them after the end of August. Pruning them at this stage, stimulates them to grow. This new growth will freeze before it hardens off. While this most likely won’t kill your shrub, it’ll give you a lot of injured areas to prune in the spring. You should prune flowering shrubs like azaleas, forsythia, and lilacs right after they quit flowering for the year. If you wait, they won’t flower for two years.
Mistake Three – Forgetting to Aerate Your Lawn
Any compacted soil needs to be manually loosened up now and again. You can do this through core aeration, and you should do it every fall. If you do it in the spring like a lot of people mistakenly do, you could find a lot of weeds in your yard because weed seeds love to grow in these aeration holes. Aerate in the fall months when the grass is still growing by weeds are at a low point. Aeration allows for more moisture and air to get into the lawn, and this encourages thick growth in the spring.
Mistake Four – You Don’t Protect the Trees
Thin-barked, or young trees you just planted like ash or maple can easily sustain damage over the winter due to bugs or temperature fluctuations. By the time November rolls around, you should protect the trees using tree wrap. Start from the bottom and work your way up. You can remove it in the spring.
Mistake Five – You Don’t Feed Your Lawn
Instead of waiting until the spring to fertilize the lawn, do it in the fall. Applying fertilizer at this time will give your grass time to establish a strong root system over the winter months. In turn, it’ll come back greener and thicker than before.
Contact Evergreen Landscaping
If you want to avoid these five fall landscaping mistakes and get professional help to ensure your landscaping looks top-notch all year, contact Evergreen Landscaping. Our staff is ready to help in any way they can.