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comprehensive garden maintenance

Comprehensive Garden Maintenance

Spring Cleanup

Spring Cleanup is one of the most important parts of your garden maintenance regiments. Spring is the time that you want to take to go through your landscape and check all of your plants out to make sure that they all survived the winter.

First part is to go through and remove any leaf debris that may have blown in from a neighbor’s or from the insufferable oaks and beeches that continue to hold on to their foliage through a good portion of the winter. Once your beds have been cleaned up go through and check to make sure all of your perennials that provided you with winter interest and texture get cut back such as; ornamental grasses, sedum ‘Autumn Joy’, Butter Fly Bush and even the Giant Hibiscus. Some woody ornamental need to be gone through at this point as well to help develop proper shape and vigor for the season, such as roses, red twig dogwoods and hydrangea. These plants require early attention to make sure that their growth is not leggy and to reduce health issues that some of these plants will develop when they are overgrown and unkempt.

At this time any perennial weeds that may have been missed in the prior growing season should be removed. Fertilizers and other soil amendments should be applied such as holly tone for any of your broadleaf evergreens, hydrangeas and dogwoods. Fertilizers and soil amendments are best applied at this point because the plant is just starting to pull nutrients from the soil. Mulching is also best done in the early spring for maintenance purposes; it is easier to spread much when your perennials have yet to emerge from their winter slumber, it is not necessary it is just convenient.