Maintaining Your Gardens & Lawn Care This Fall

We will be passing on a series of tips to help you transition your home and yard to the fall season. We will cover the following in a series of blog posts:

  ~  Home Exterior  ~  Keeping Warm/Doors and Windows  ~
  ~  Gardens  ~  Lawn Care  ~  Attic Pest Control  ~
~  Carbon Monoxide and Smoke Detectors  ~

We have covered “Your Home’s Exterior”, “Keeping Warm/Doors and Windows“. Now let’s talk about your gardens and lawn care.

Gardens

•  Fall is the perfect time to divide or move perennials. Remove dead annuals and mulch hardy perennials. Annuals typically die when temperatures drop below freezing. But perennials often appear as though they too have bitten the bullet. That’s because their top growth dies back, although in most cases the root ball is hardy enough to survive even extreme temperatures, especially if it’s covered with a layer of mulch.

• The best time to mulch perennials is after the first hard freeze. Just make sure you don’t cover the crown or center of the plant, because that can lead to rot.

• Clean garden tools before storing for the winter.

• Trim dead branches out the trees to prevent them from coming down and causing damage in a winter storm.

Lawn Care

• Rake up the thick layers of leaves that settle on lawn surfaces. Large leaves in particular, especially when they get wet, can compact to the point where they suffocate the grass below and lead to all kinds of insect and disease problems. So it’s a good idea to routinely rake or blow them off the lawn or, better yet, use a mulching mower to shred them into fine pieces.

• Put the raked leaves in the compost pile or use as a mulch. Whatever you do, don’t waste fallen leaves because they’re an excellent source of nutrients and organic matter. You can also add them to flower beds to put a winter blanket on your garden.

• Fall is a good time to aerate your lawn; it will allow moisture and nutrients to get into the roots. When you’re done, spread fertilizer then grass seed.

• This will be the ideal time to sow cool-season grasses such as fescue and rye – it will give them the opportunity to germinate and develop a good root system before freezing temperatures arrive. It’s also the right time to fertilize turf grasses, preferably with slow-release, all-natural fertilizer. When given adequate nutrients, turf grasses have the ability to store food in the form of carbohydrates during the winter months. That will mean a better-looking lawn come spring.