“Winterizing Your Yard.”
Tips provided by Dave Rasmussen, Rasmussen Landscapes
www.rasmussenlandscapes.com“It is that time of the year where everyone is in a rush to get our yards prepared for the winter. It is a huge job to tackle and most people need help with all or at least part of it. There are things like clean out your rain gutters and down spouts, having a winterizer application of fertilizer put down on your lawn, shutting down and blowing out your sprinkler system, wrapping fragile trees and shrubs, clean up leaves, cutting back perennials, removing annuals, pruning trees and shrubs (incl roses), split and relocate perennials, taking hoses off (disconnecting hoses), removing veg plants (to avoid varmints), and the list goes on and on.
Here are just a few:
Leaf Pick-Up2) Cutting Back Perennial FlowersPruning Trees & ShrubsWinterizing your sprinkler system. 1) Leaf Pick-Up: Everyone is familiar with falling leaves in the fall. They start in early October and some don’t stop until December and they are very hard to keep up with. We pick up leaves not only because it is aesthetically pleasing but also because they can cause damage to our lawns and other parts of the yard. On a lawn, they become a breeding ground for snow mold and pests. This is one of the most common things people call us for in the fall. It can save a family an entire Saturday of working in the yard.
2) Cutting Back Perennial Flowers: Where leaves are fairly self explanatory, many have questions as to what to do with the rest of the yard in the fall. Most of the flowers at this time of year look like this (show dead looking perennials). In the fall we cut these back to prepare for them to re-bloom next season. (We will show some already done and some we are starting on.) Annuals can be pulled out as they will not come back next year.
3) Pruning Trees & Shrubs: There are several reasons we prune our trees and shrubs. One is so they look nice. Another is to protect them from the harsh winter and the weight of the heavy snow. It also promotes new growth. It is important to prune them in such a way as to increase blooms in the next growing season especially if it blooms flowers.
4) It is important to properly shut down your sprinkler system. Water expands when it freezes (everyone has left a can of pop in the freezer and come back to it having exploded all over the place. The same will happen with your sprinkler system and can cause major flooding. It is not only important to turn off the water but also to blow the water out of the lines.
