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How to Handle Ice and Snow Safely (and When to Get Help!)

March 7, 2024December 13, 2017 by The Parke Company

In Nashville we don’t get a ton of snow and ice, but we get enough. When it does come, one of the biggest challenges is to clear porches, sidewalks, and driveways to prevent slip and falls and get the car safely in and out of the garage.

So, who does this? Some of our clients have longer, tree-lined driveways, others have more traditional lengths. In both cases, clearing ice and snow will be a challenge, one they may decide to take on themselves or find some help.

At the Parke Company, Nashville’s leading landscaping service and tree service, we know a little about snow removal. While we don’t offer “snow mitigation,” we’ve dealt with the aftermath, which unfortunately can result in removing a tree damaged by sloppy use of deicer.

We’d like to pass along a few tips on how to handle snow and ice to ensure your paved surfaces are safe without doing damage to your plants, trees, and lawn.

How to Handle Winter Weather

Snow Removal with Heart

When we talk about heart, we mean yours. If you opt to shovel, snow blow, or spread deicer, there are a few things you should be aware of. First, shoveling snow can either be great exercise or trigger a heart attack. Nashville ERs staff up when it snows because they know they will have a rush of coronary emergencies to deal with.

If you don’t regularly exercise, now is not the time to start. Make arrangements for a snow removal service to tend to the chore. Cold weather drives blood pressure up and cold air rapidly dehydrates the body. Toss in repeatedly lifting shovel loads of snow or pushing a heavy blower and you have the makings of a heart attack.

If you feel pain or “squeezing” in your chest, pain radiating down your left arm, jaw pain, shortness of breath, or you break out in a cold sweat, quit, go inside, and call 911.

Preparation

The best way to defeat ice is to prepare paved surfaces before the ice actually arrives. Keep an eye on the weather report and when snow or ice is in the forecast, prep your surfaces. If you want to go totally “green,” spread wood chips, straw, or gravel to encourage traction. After the ice arrives, you can spread sand on top. However, all of these “green” solutions need to be cleaned up after the ice thaws.

Deicers are the most common method of clearing snow and ice, and this is where you can do some real damage. One of the favorite deicers is sodium chloride, AKA rock salt. It’s popular because it’s dirt cheap. Salt is a corrosive, and it is capable of burning a pet’s paws as well as killing any grass or bushes that come in contact from the runoff.

Alternatives to rock salt include potassium chloride, calcium chloride, and magnesium chloride. All three are pet and plant friendly. Unfortunately, all three are more expensive than rock salt. The good news is, after a few short months spring will arrive and we at the Parke Company can get back to tree trimming, tree planting and other landscaping tasks. Until then, we wish you a safe and enjoyable winter season.

Fertilizing in Winter to See More Green in Spring

August 26, 2024December 7, 2017 by The Parke Company

In Nashville, most lawns are planted with cool-growth grass like bluegrass and tall fescue. These grasses grow longer into the fall and actually don’t go dormant until after the first hard freeze. Because of this “cool-weather” growth, a Nashville lawn can benefit from a late fall or early winter application of fertilizer.

The Parke Company, a full-service Nashville landscaping service and tree service, often recommends a late season application of fertilizer to feed the grass for the limited time it will continue to grow. Just as importantly, the fertilizer allows the grass to store nutrients in the roots, allowing the grass to come up green and lush in spring.

Winter, even our comparatively mild winters, can be hard on a lawn. Because the grass turns brown, many people seem to forget that the lawn still needs care, mostly protective care. A late fertilizer application, and even a late lawn aeration can go a long way in making your spring lawn strong and healthy, but it has to survive to spring first.

Winter Lawn Care Tips

Lawn problems are not limited to those months when the temperatures go up and the sun shines all day. Winter can bring problems that can actually kill grass, trees, shrubs, and flowering plants. To keep that risk to a minimum, follow these simple tips:

Keep your lawn clean. Dormant grass can be crushed. Grass can be “broken” by foot traffic or by something as light as a pile of leaves that sits on the grass in the same place for months. Winter can litter your lawn, creating those “light weight” dangers. Snow and winter rains will strip the last of any leaves left, snap twigs and weaker limbs, and scatter debris from the neighborhood onto your lawn. Periodically clean up the litter and do a leaf pickup. Your leaf rake is probably your best tool. It’s time consuming but it gets the job done without using a heavy machine and it gets you some outdoor exercise.
Keep your walkways clear. One way to minimize foot traffic on your lawn is to ensure your sidewalks and driveway are kept cleared of ice and snow. If you use a deicer to clear your walkways, make sure you use a plant safe formulation. Sodium chloride, AKA rock salt, will not only corrode your sidewalk, but if it gets on anything living like grass or shrubs, it may kill it.
Cover your fragile shrubs. If you have rose bushes or other more fragile plants, cover them with burlap. Nashville gets a little snow, but we get more than our fair share of sleet. A good sleet storm – and it only takes one – can devastate a rose garden.

Of course, if you don’t have the time to maintain your lawn in the winter, you can always call the Parke Company for assistance. Preventing damage in winter makes taking care of your lawn in the spring significantly easier. If we can help you with that, we would be delighted to assist.

Safe Salt and Mineral Options for Your Walkways This Winter

March 7, 2024November 30, 2017 by The Parke Company

We are fortunate in Nashville. While winters can bring some nasty weather, our cold months are relatively mild compared to our neighbors to the north. That said, we still get ice and snow and have our fair share of slip and fall accidents as a result.

So how do Nashville homeowners wage the deicing war? Unfortunately, many attack the ice with rock salt (sodium chloride). Rock salt has one redeeming characteristic: it is dirt cheap. But if you take a hard look at what rock salt can do, it quickly becomes obvious that repeated use can cause serious, expensive damage.

Rock salt is an abrasive and a corrosive and will wreak havoc on concrete walkways and driveways. At the Parke Company, Nashville’s premiere landscaping service, we are concerned about how sodium chloride affects our clients’ landscape. Not surprisingly, rock salt is not plant friendly.

What to Know About Rock Salt

How Rock Salt Damages Your Landscape

There are a number of ways that sodium chloride can damage plants, trees, and grass. Salt spray either from the road or from traffic on your driveway can burn stems and buds of deciduous woody plants, plus stems, buds, leaves and needles of evergreen plants.

Run off is another sneakier way that sodium chloride does damage. When diluted with water, sodium chloride splits into separate ions. These ions can prevent absorption of other nutrients like potassium and phosphorus. Chloride can make its way to leaves and interfere with chlorophyll. When this process is disturbed in deciduous shrubs and trees, the plant can die.

None of the signs of sodium chloride in the soil will become evident until the spring when the plants and trees begin to renew. If the concentration is high enough, a homeowner could be looking at replacing shrubs or even a tree removal.

Safe Alternatives to Rock Salt

There are a number of chemical and non-chemical substitutes for rock salt that are safe (or safer) for your plants. They all have different characteristics but what they all have in common is they cost more than rock salt.

Here’s a quick rundown:

Potassium chloride: This is perhaps the friendliest deicer for plants. It is only effective down to 25 degrees but that covers most of Nashville’s cold weather.
Magnesium chloride: Works down to 1 degree and is plant friendly. It may leave a residue on driveways and sidewalks that will need to be washed off once the risk of icing is over.
Calcium chloride: Kind of overkill. This works down to -23 degrees. If Nashville gets that kind of weather, your plants are in serious trouble any way you look at it. Calcium chloride works fast, which means it melts the ice and creates water, which is subject to refreezing.
Heated Driveways: The ultimate solution. Without question the most effective way to prevent ice from forming or melting it if it has. Exceptionally convenient and also exceptionally expensive. Installation involves digging up your existing driveway.

Managing ice is a serious concern. There is the obvious risk associated with ice but you have to consider the consequences of the way you fight it. As a leading tree service, we have seen trees, bushes, and perennials that have been sufficiently damaged by deicers so that they needed to be removed. Nothing is sadder than seeing a tree cut down or removing a tree simply because the wrong kind of deicer was used.

Do’s and Don’ts for DIY Holiday Lighting Outdoors

March 7, 2024November 27, 2017 by The Parke Company

Please Note: The Parke Company is not offering installation services this season.

At the Parke Company, Nashville’s leading landscaping service and tree service organization, we know our way around decorating outdoor trees. In fact, this year it was the Parke Company that cut and helped decorate the 35-year-old, 35-foot Norway spruce used for the State of Tennessee’s Christmas tree at the state capitol in Nashville.

When done right, outdoor Christmas lighting can be awe inspiring, creating the perfect backdrop for the season’s spirit. It can spread that spirit to the entire neighborhood. But all it takes is one home to drag that seasonal joy down.

You know which one we mean. It’s the house with the fuse-busting display of 10,000 multicolored lights that blink in time to Christmas carols, and has the giant, inflatable Santa Claus on the front lawn. It’s the homeowner who strongly believes that “more is better,” and who measures the success of his display by how fast his electricity meter spins rather than the actual appearance.

With a little common sense, and a few tips from Nashville’s tree trimmers, you can avoid becoming your neighborhood’s Clark Griswold from “Christmas Vacation.”

LED Versus Conventional Christmas Lights

Technologically, LED lights have come a long way. Originally, LED bulbs gave off a blue tint, a “cool light” that most people didn’t care for. Today, if you select LED lights marked “warm” you will receive bright, full colored light that rivals any form of incandescent lighting.

Of course, they are environmentally friendly, using next to nothing in electrical power. They are also more reliable than conventional lights and last significantly longer.

The downside to LED lights is their cost. The initial outlay will be significantly higher than conventional lights. Over time, however, LEDs may prove to be the better investment.

The big advantage of traditional lights is cost. Prices have dropped significantly over the past decade. Because you are not terribly concerned if a string of conventional lights is damaged, taking them off trees becomes easier. If you use a professional to decorate and take down decorations, cutting the traditional string of lights rather than trying to unwrap it from a branch will save you a significant amount of labor costs.

Do’s and Don’ts for Holiday Outdoor Lighting

There are some basic “rules of the road” to consider when decorating outdoors. Follow these and the odds of a successful decorating project increase substantially.

Do: Have a plan before you begin. Check your inventory and the location of your power sources to ensure have enough of both to carry out the plan. Also consider how you are going to take down the display after the holidays.
Don’t: Mix LED and conventional lights. They don’t give off the same hue and will stand out like a sore thumb. If you do use both, use them on different sections, i.e. house and trees.
Do: Use more lighting if your house sits back from the road to enhance curb appeal. You don’t have to go “Griswold” but if you want people to see it, you need to go a little heavier with the lighting. If you use LED lights you won’t need as many. Their extra bright light will help you keep down your tree trimming cost.
Do: Leave at least a foot of space between the edges of your driveway and any staked lighting you are using to outline it. This will avoid problems if a car goes off the edge while trying to back out in the dark.
Do: Outline the architectural features of your home. Roof lines, peaks, gables, and porches can help give depth to the display. Electric candles in windows add a classic touch and a little variety to just string lights.
Do: Use pre-lit garland and wreaths on doors.
Do: And this should have been number two on the list, get your spouse’s agreement on the plan before you begin.
Don’t: Use all green or red lights. This is your home, not a commercial enterprise.
Don’t: Use as many lights if you are decorating with LED bulbs. LED lights are significantly brighter than conventional.

With a little planning you can make this year’s tree trimming project the best ever.

Winter is the Perfect Time for Debris Removal and Cleanup

March 7, 2024November 21, 2017 by The Parke Company

At the Parke Company, we are known by our Nashville clients for our landscaping services, tree service, installation of irrigation systems, sourcing shrubs and flowers, and other traditional landscape tasks. Of course, most of those tasks take place when things are growing. Spring and fall are our busiest seasons.

But when winter arrives, it brings its own set of lawn problems.

Nashville is a southern city, so we don’t get much snow compared to our neighbors to the north. In fact, Nashville only averages about 7 inches of snow in any given winter. We get rain, and the temperature drops to an average of about six degrees above freezing. That limits the amount of outdoor activities that the fine folks of Nashville are willing to participate in, and it creates a problem for lawns and other outdoor spaces.

Too Cold to Do Much of Anything?

While driving on a freeway or even a residential street during the winter months, you’ll probably notice that the landscape looks a bit trashy.

Culverts will have filled up with windblown leaves, trash and debris. Lawns may appear to be unkempt because they are littered with debris. Our Nashville winter scenes rarely consist of pristine snow-covered lawns, but rather cluttered spaces with mostly grey skies up above.

Why do our winters look like this? In part it’s because it’s just considered too cold for many homeowners or even state road maintenance to be out raking and cleaning debris. It’s not that there is some “extra” supply of winter trash that somehow hits our landscape, it’s just that the usual trash is not picked up.

While a debris-filled lawn is not attractive, it can actually do harm as well. If left unattended, the debris can damage the grass under it when the first thaw hits.

Our early springs tend to be wet and muddy. Leaves, twigs, and other “yard trash” can hinder the growth of the grass when it comes out of dormancy. This can leave yellow patches or off green patches unless the debris is removed.

If you have done a good job of mulching, you may be inviting another, smaller, threat to your lawn. Field mice love mulch. If you see narrow yellow trails coursing across your lawn, these are the rodent freeways to the mulch bed. Raking out the trails will help the trampled grass and give it a chance to survive when spring arrives.

Clean Up Winter Debris

Obviously, the way to avoid yellow spots in the spring is to clean up debris during the winter. If your lawn is fenced, has hardscaping or drainage ditches, finding the debris will be easy. Winter winds will pile up the debris in these areas.

The trusty leaf rake can do leaf collection, but for most of our clients with large lawns, this will be a full weekend project. A leaf vacuum mulcher can handle most of the task. Large items (twigs, branches, trash) will need to be collected and bagged manually.

Of course, if you don’t have the time for a winter lawn cleanup, you can always call us at the Parke Company, and we will be happy to handle the job. We have the crews and the equipment to make quick work of transforming your debris-littered lawn into a clean winter landscape.

Let’s all hope for an early spring.