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Five Winter Landscaping Tips

Winter is approaching, and you want to keep your landscaping as neat and healthy as you can all year. To do this, there are several steps you can take in preparation for the cooler weather. Following our top five winter landscaping tips will ensure that you get a landscape that you can be proud of any time of the year.

Tip One – Know Your Hardiness Zone

Although this sounds like something you should automatically do, you’d be surprised at how many people skip knowing their hardiness zone. You want to find out what it is and pick out plants that thrive in that specific zone. Don’t be tempted to keep a zone five plant in your zone seven backyard. Unless you have a microclimate that will allow less hardy plants to thrive, you want to stick to shrubs, trees, and plants especially suited for your zone. This is especially important if you live in a climate with a harsh winter.

Tip Two – Wrap Newly Planted and Young Plants

During the winter, any newly planted and young trees need a little more protection to survive. If you leave thin-barked trees like maple, linden, and ash unprotected, they can end up with sunscald and frost cracking. Additionally, younger trees make the perfect meal for rodents, weakening, or killing the tree. Wrap the tree from the bottom up with burlap or thick paper tree wrap. You can also use a corrugated tube. When the tree begins to show growth signs, remove these protective measures. These protective measures can prevent frost cracking and rodent damage.

Tip Three – Avoid Using Salt-Based De-Icing Products

During the winter, you’ll eventually get ice. However, using a salt-based de-icing product is one easy way to kill your landscaping plants and your grass. Your plants can absorb the salt through the roots or leaves, and this salt absorption will make the tissue dry out by pulling moisture from the plant. Instead, try to use sand instead of salt-based products. If that doesn’t work, you can try a deicer that is potassium or calcium-based and see how it works for you. It may take a little longer, but it’s better for your yard.

Tip Four – Mulch

Many people mulch in the spring months to help your plants retain moisture, but mulch is also essential in the fall and winter months. Mulch can help insulate the ground and protect your plant’s roots from bitterly cold weather or frost. It stops the soil from going through a cycle of repeatedly freezing and thawing, and this is better for the plants. Put down three or four inches of mulch after the first freeze. Don’t get too close to the trunks or stems of your plants.

Tip Five – Water

A lot of gardeners stop watering in the winter, and this can hurt any evergreen plants you have. If you don’t water them enough, the evergreens will quickly deplete their water stores. When this happens, they become more prone to death and winter burn. Water them deeply several times a week before the ground freezes. Once it freezes, you can cut back on your watering.

Contact Evergreen Landscaping

If you’d like to know more about winter landscaping tips, contact us. Our friendly and professional staff are standing by and ready to help in any way they can.

How Can I Fix A Brown Lawn?

Everyone wants a lush and green lawn. Few things are more frustrating than having dead, brown patches dotting an otherwise flawless landscaping design. Luckily, there are things you can do to get rid of these unsightly brown spots on your lawn, and we’ve picked out several excellent things you can try.

Pay Attention to Your Watering Schedule

If you notice your brown grass gets worse when the temperatures rise, you could have a drought problem. During limited rainfall, grass can go dormant and turn brown to conserve water. Once the weather cools, and the water levels increase, your brown grass should turn green. If you want to push it along, give your lawn an inch or so of water every week. You want to water early in the day to avoid scorching the grass, and remember to use an irrigation system that reaches every area of your space.

Reduce Your Fertilizer Use

Fertilizer has a lot of excess salt that can build up, and this can scorch the grass and cause brown patches. If the brown patches appear a day or two after you apply the fertilizer, you have fertilizer burn. To fix it, water the area thoroughly to flush out the salt and excess fertilizer. Water your lawn an inch a day for the next week to get rid of the fertilizer and protect the lawn’s roots. In the future, pick out slow-release fertilizers and apply them following the instructions on the bag for your lawn type and size.

Balance the pH Levels

When your pH levels in the soil are too acidic, your lawn will develop yellow or brown patches. Get a pH testing kit and check your soil levels. If the pH reads higher than 7.2, you want to apply sulfur to lower it. The more clay-based your soil is, the more sulfur it’ll need to balance the pH. Sandy soil that has a pH reading of 7.5 should only need 10 to 15-pounds of sulfur for every 1,000-square feet. For every 1,000-square feet of loamy soil, you’d need 20 to 25-pounds of sulfur.

Have a Potty Area for Your Pets

Yes, it’s easy to open the door and let your pets go to the bathroom wherever. However, this can cause brown spots on your lawn due to salt in your pet’s urine. You’ll have to cover these areas with ground limestone at a rate of two to five pounds for every 100-square feet. Let it sit for a week to restore your lawn’s pH levels before covering it with topsoil and planting new grass seeds. Set up a mulched potty area for your pets going forward.

Get Rid of Weeds

Did you know that weeds and tree roots will pull a host of vital nutrients from your grass like water and fertilizer? In turn, you get a brown, dry lawn. Spray your lawn with a selective herbicide or dig up problem weeds as you see them. Once you remove them, spray a pre-emergent herbicide over your lawn to stop new weeds from growing again.

Contact Evergreen Landscaping

Do you have brown patches in your lawn that won’t go away? Maybe you need professional help to get a lush and green lawn. If so, contact us. Our friendly and professional staff are ready and willing to help you in any way they can.

How to Protect Your Plants When You Paint Your House

You want to put a new coat of paint on your house to brighten it up and boost the curb appeal, but what happens to all of your prized plants? Paint is toxic, and it can cause a lot of damage. That’s not to mention the damage any painting company can accidentally do when they come in with their scaffolding, ladders, and other paint gear. However, there are several things you can do to preserve your plants and get your home ready for a new coat of paint.

1. Move Your Potted Plants

One of the quickest and easiest things you can do before the paint crew shows up is to move any of your potted plants away or into the house. If you move them away, make sure they’re still in their preferred growing conditions. You can group them together around your yard, or you can bring them indoors in a sunny location and let them be until it’s time to move them back when the project finishes.

2. Remove Climbing Plants or Ivy

Yes, ivy and other climbing plants look nice attached to your home, but they can actually cause damage to the exterior. Before anyone gets there to paint, you’ll have to remove them. If you’re really attached to them, you could save several cuttings and start them on trellises inside your home or in a nice location in your yard. They’ll eventually grow and start climbing again, and you can put them up against your home to encourage them to climb.

3. Wrap Bushes and Shrubs

First, trim away any dead, broken, or dying parts of your trees or shrubs by the house to leave healthy growth. Once you do, you can wrap your bushes and shrubs with a protective layer of burlap or landscape fabric. You want to secure this in place with tape, rope, or twine to ensure it anchors in place and doesn’t accidentally slide off with the wind or the crews moving around. When they finish painting and pack up, you can uncover these areas.

4. Cover Your Flower Beds

Paint spray and splatter is a side effect of taking on a large-scale project like painting the exterior of your home. You want to take time to protect your flower beds or vegetable gardens if it’s not practical to dig them up and move them. If they have fences around them, you can drape landscape fabric over them to provide a barrier. If not, you can lightly put burlap or landscape fabric around and over your flower beds before using stakes or rocks to hold it in place. If you use white fabric, it’ll make it easy to avoid stepping on it.

5. Trim Greenery

Ideally, you’ll have at least eight-inches between any greenery and your home, but a full foot is often the best way to go. To do this, you will have to trim and prune back any shrubs or plants that are too close to your home. This will help protect them from the paint, and it’ll also give the painters more than enough room to work without stepping on anything.

Contact Evergreen Landscaping

We can help get your yard ready for exterior house painting. We can give you advice or tips on how to protect your precious plants and shrubs. Contact us to set up an appointment today.

5 Fall Landscaping Mistakes to Avoid

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.

Should Your Yard Have a Focal Point?

No matter if you have a large or small yard, focal points are nice to have. They can draw your eye around the space in a natural flow, or you can create one that draws people in to gather around. But, should your yard have a focal point? Isn’t it fine by itself? What is the focal point? We’ll answer all of these questions and more below.

What is a Focal Point?

Done correctly, a focal point can be your best friend. It’s an object, container, or plant that gives anyone that sees it an attractive visual entry point. Focal points can direct your guests where to look initially before smoothly directing them to take a glance around the surrounding area. You can create one larger focal point or several smaller ones that you strategically place around your garden or yard to draw your visitor’s eyes. You can also use your focal points to distract people or hide things you don’t want them to see as a utility box.

Four Focal Point Benefits

Although there are dozens of potential benefits with focal points, we picked out what we consider to be the biggest four. They can help you decide if you want to incorporate one into your yard or garden.

• Intensifies the Surroundings – A colorful or bright container or bench can help amplify the surrounding colors. It can add warm tones to grey areas, or it can make your grass seem greener. In turn, this can make your entire space look warm and inviting.
• Directs the Eye – If you have a lot going on in your yard or garden, it’s easy to get lost. However, a focal point can help direct the eye from place to place while making it more streamlined. Bright colors grab your viewers’ attention and help them orient themselves.
• Gives Inspiration – Once your focal point grabs someone’s attention, you can play off it and use it for inspiration for the rest of your yard. Maybe your focal point is a bench. If so, you could center it in your yard and build the rest of your design up around it.
• Adds Height – Many people get stuck trying to figure out how to add height to a flat garden or landscape. A focal point like a fountain or a planter on a stand is one quick way to accomplish this. Height can also add variety and interest to your yard.

Do You Need Focal Points

No, you don’t absolutely need focal points in your yard or garden. However, they have many benefits that come with them, and they’re relatively easy to use. In the end, it all comes down to personal preference. If you already have a flowing yard or garden planned, a focal point could disrupt it and make it seem disjointed. If you don’t have a plan, a focal point gives you a starting place to build your design.

Contact Evergreen Landscaping

Do you want help deciding if you need a focal point or not? Maybe you have more questions or would like an expert’s opinion. Whatever the reason, contact Evergreen Landscaping today