Taking care of your landscaping may be the last thing on your mind during our Nashville winters, but there are preventive and maintenance steps that you should be aware of. The Parke Company, Nashville’s premiere landscaping service and tree service, has five easy tips to get your spring lawn off to a great start.
This winter has been a doozy so far, with temperatures in January fluctuating from 21 degrees to 64 degrees. However, just because there may be frost or snow on the ground does not mean that your landscaping will take care of itself until the real spring thaw.
Landscaping Tips for The Winter
Winter is Not the Time to Ignore Your Landscaping
With that in mind, we would like to offer up five tips to help your lawn make it through the winter unscathed:
Discourage people from walking on the grass when there is frost or snow on the ground. Grass, particularly young grass blades, can break from the weight. While typically the grass will recover in spring, we still recommend traffic be kept to a minimum. Make sure your walkways are cleared of snow to discourage people from taking a shortcut across the lawn.
Protect plants from cold, dry winter winds. Frost and dry winds can damage trees, cracking bark and limbs. Needles on evergreen shrubs can be severely damaged and turn an ugly brown. Of special concern are plants with roots near or exposed to the surface. Cover the base of the plant with mulch to provide protection from the wind.
Winter is actually a great time to add to your landscape. The deciduous transplant season begins right after the first hard freeze and continues until the first leaves appear in spring. Transplanting after the plant has gone dormant for the winter provides more time for it to acclimate to its new bed because it’s not pushing new growth.
Do you have crepe myrtles, liriope (monkey grass), or boxwoods? Winter is a good time for pruning these. In fact, you can only prune them while they are dormant. Now is also a good time to put down pre-emergent herbicide to hold down the weeds. In Nashville, we unfortunately have a variety of weeds that thrive during the winter.
Spend some time doing what we do for our clients during the winter season planning. When the warmer weather of spring hits and you feel like anything is possible now that you have survived winter – in other words, you’re on an emotional high – it is the wrong time to order additions to your landscaping. You’ll be happier if you plan out your spring flower additions, tree services, hardscape additions, and any other landscape issues when you have the down time of winter to work with.With a little luck, Nashville will get a thaw in late March and our landscapes will turn green again. Make sure your lawn and plants wake up from the winter snooze in good condition by caring for them during the cold season.
Need help planning for spring? Feel free to give us a call and we’ll be happy to discuss the latest landscaping trends with you.