Fall Landscaping Maintenance Checklist
Fall is always known as the prime time to prep your yard or landscape for the next growing season. Especially in Colorado, it’s essential to prepare your yard for the bipolar winter coming in just a couple weeks. Cooling temperatures slow all aboveground growth of plants and shrubs while the moist soil underneath encourages strong root development during this time. There are several particular practices our professional luxury landscapers here at Bella Giardino Landscape & Garden Designs would like to share with you to help you take full advantage of Colorado’s Fall season and get your home’s outdoor designs ready for next year. Check out our Fall landscaping maintenance checklist below to ensure you’ll be ready:
Aerate Your Lawn
If rainfall or snow pools on your grass lawn, it’s time to aerate! Compressing the soil and creating soil plugs so water and nutrients can reach the roots is a key factor to having your lawn survive the winter and come back to life next year.
Feed Your Grass
Grass roots continue growing until the ground gets down to around 40 degrees, so Fall is a perfect time to feed them. This helps encourage the roots of any grass types to hold strong in winter and spring up earlier come next year.
Mow a Final Time
It’s suggested to trim turf down to about 1¼ inches for the last cut of the season so germs/disease/mold don’t stick around and so fallen leaves can blow across the lawn without latching on to anything. Don’t go too short on the cut though as grass makes most of its food and nutrition in the upper section of the blade.
Collect Dead Leaves
Gathering dead leaves that have fallen into a pile not only cleans up your yard for aesthetic reasons, it also gives you a free nourishing material for Spring. The blackish gold leaves left over are actually a great source of sustenance for the following year to help nourish lawns, flower beds, and shrub borders!
Plant New Shrubs
In many parts of the country, including Colorado, planting new shrubs in the Fall gives the plants a strong head start at establishing roots in the season’s cool, moist soil.
Trim Dead Limbs
Dead branches become lifeless factors in winter snow and winds, endangering both you and your home. Protect your small ornamental trees from further damage by cutting cracked, loose, or dead limbs close to the trunk off while leaving the wounds exposed to heal.
Cut Back Perennials
A little work during the Fall produces healthier flower beds come Springtime. Take out all annuals and the snails/slugs that feed on them since these bugs breed during the Fall, so you have less of an infestation next year. Trim dead perennial foliage down to the ground too as this delivers more energy to the roots for better production next season.
Mulch Young Plants
Give new flower or foliage beds a layer of mulch after one of the first light Colorado frosts but before the ground freezes for added protection. This mulch can include chopped leaves, weed-free straw, or wood chips you purchase at your local home and garden store. You’ll want this decomposed layer of mulch materials to soak into the soil to keep new plantings warm during the winter, and control water/melted snow runoff and soil erosion.
Dry Out Drip & Irrigation Systems
Standing water can freeze and crack the drip-irrigation tubing in drip watering systems. For simple setups, shut the water completely off, unscrew the tap-joint adapter, and insert some type of simple air hose inside the tube tap and blow all leftover water completely out to avoid any freezing issues.
Our Colorado Springs luxury landscapers know how important your landscape design is. With these simple steps in the Fall, you can immensely help your yard stay strong and alive during the winter so next Spring season is a more fruitful one. Protect your foliage, flowers, plants and trees now to produce the best Spring growth ever. For more information regarding this Fall Landscape Maintenance Checklist, or for more information regarding our local landscape services, give Bella a call today! We always love to see local yards come back to life with ease. Book your Spring outdoor living redesign with us today to get ahead!