Preparing Your Landscape For The Winter

Winter is coming in New England and it’s time to prepare your landscape for the cold and wet days ahead. These are the services we provide our clients to make sure their properties are ready for the cold and best prepared for next season.

It is important that there is no water in your irrigation system over the winter. When a deep frost arrives water will freeze and expand in the tubes and heads of your irrigation system. Blowing out your irrigation system will prevent the tubes from breaking and save you from expensive repairs in the spring.

Leaving leaves in your garden beds can help protect your perennials and shrubs over the winter by helping insulate the roots of the plants. They also add a layer of mulch that will deteriorate into the soil over the winter, giving your beds nutrients. Keep in mind you want to remove these leaves by early spring so that perennials and bulbs can come up.

As for the rest of the yard, leaving the leaves in your garden over the winter can be detrimental. Leaves are messy and will blow onto other areas of your landscape where they are not meant to be. Leaving leaves on the lawn will create a wet layer on top of the grass and suffocate the grass seed. Because of this, GreenOp removes leaves from the beds of the landscapes we manage unless requested otherwise.

A good alternative instead of getting rid of your leaves is to compost them and spread it throughout the lawn. This will cause the leaves to decompose between the grass and allow the grass to retain their nutrients without suffocating it.

Late fall is the time of year when perennials have done their job and it’s time to say goodbye to the beautiful flowers for the winter. It’s important to cut back perennials in the fall to reduce the aggressive spreading, remove areas for bugs to infest, remove any potential disease from getting into your soil, and to make spring preparations easier.

When we are cutting back the perennials on our properties we:

• Wait until frost has hit and we start to see the plant top dying.
• Cut the perennial above the ground, leaving a small stem so we can see the perennial in the spring.
• Look out for diseased leaves to remove.
• Keep new growth that tends to be at the bottom of some perennials (they’ll need this growth in the spring).

We have serviced all of our lawns by this point in the season, but it’s not too late for you to act on a few of these fall to dos below. Fall is the most important time to work on your lawn, the temperature is perfect for grass seed.

Here’s what we did to our lawns this fall:

• Aerated and Overseeded – this will reduce the pressure in the soil (from our mowers or people walking on it often), allowing the soil to retain moisture and the nutrients we are trying to add to it.
• Overseed any sparse/empty areas with fresh topsoil/compost mix.

It may not be too late for you to do this to your lawn. You only need a week or so for your seed to germinate, once it germinates it will go dormant over the winter and come back in the spring.

Planting seed in the spring will only give it one season to germinate and strengthen before the heat waves of the summer come and stress the grass, killing it if not properly managed with water. It is much better to plant grass seed in the fall.

We also give all of our lawns a fall fertilizer to change the PH of the soil, increasing the lawn’s overall health. This is better to do earlier in the fall around September and October.

You may need to protect your shrubs this winter from the winter elements.

If the shape of your shrubs are important to you (perfect line of boxwoods, yews, privets, etc.) then you should make sure to tie your shrubs for the winter to prevent heavy snow fall from breaking the stems and changing the shape of your perfectly manicured shrubs.

If shrubs are in a drop zone (snow falling from your roof, shovelers throwing snow on it, etc.) we can build wooden barriers over the shrub to prevent it from being crushed.

If you have evergreens on your property and you want to prevent winter browning, you can wrap your shrubs in burlap. Evergreens keep their leaves over the winter, those leaves continue to take in energy from the sun, but their root systems are frozen and not able to retain water. This stresses the shrub and will cause some browning. Wrapping your shrub in burlap will block the sun’s rays from the shrub and allow it to go dormant, reducing stress and browning.

It is safe to plant trees and shrubs in the fall months, some perennials in early fall if there are any left at the nursery. The main thing you do want to get in the ground in the fall are bulbs. Root development will continue well into the late fall and winter months as the soil takes longer to cool than the air. Like grass, the roots will then go dormant and come back in the spring as soon as possible.