Spending time and money freshening up your landscaping in Chester County this fall may seem somewhat counter-intuitive, given the fact that snow will most likely be covering up your hard work before you know it. And what of the possibility that winter frost may ruin some of the landscaping elements you’ve just added to your home’s yard?
According to professional landscapers, however, anyone living in a part of the country that experiences frigid winter weather would be well advised to add some autumn-specific landscaping tasks to their outdoor fall to-do list. For the best long-term landscape results, the following outdoor chores should be accomplished sometime between the beginning of September and the end of November.
If you tackle at least a handful of the tasks listed here, you’ll find landscaping in Chester County to be especially rewarding once the coming spring season finally arrives.
Fluff and Reapply Your Mulch
If you begin your fall landscaping to-do list by turning your mulch—fluffing it up, that is, and spreading it liberally around your plants, trees and flowerbeds—you’ll be helping your landscape receive the proper amount of moisture it needs to survive the coming season. What’s more, you’ll be helping the roots of those plants and trees from becoming damaged or even killed by frost. Fluffing your mulch will also keep you from having to spend money on a new supply of mulch, the pile of which should only be around two or three inches thick.
If you find you do need more mulch than you already have but don’t want to spend the money, consider making your own. It’s as simple as running your lawnmower over the fallen leaves in your yard a few times, and then spreading the resulting matter around your plants, trees and flower beds.
Give Your Lawn its Last Mow of the Season
Experts suggest that lawns should continue to be mowed in the cold weather seasons as long as the grass is still growing. Once the grass stops growing, then you can stop mowing. The reason? If your grass is too long when the snowfall starts, you could experience snow mold when the long blades get packed down. You also don’t want long blades of grass keeping the sun from hitting any shorter blades around them. In fact, a good rule of thumb is to keep your grass at around three inches tall throughout the entire year, if possible. That length gives the sun its best chance of hitting every blade.
Test Your Soil
If you’re spending time and money on any sort of landscaping in Chester County, it only makes sense to test the soil you’re planting in for deficiencies of any kind. Specifically, you want to have your soil tested to figure out if the pH and nutrient availability is where it should be. If it isn’t, you’ll need to have that corrected or nearly anything you plant will fail to live up to its potential—assuming, of course, that it lives at all. Landscape pros say this is a good time of year for soil testing, and you shouldn’t need to spend more than $20 or so to mail a soil sample in for testing. Remember: It all starts with the soil, which is why it’s so crucial to make sure nothing serious is going wrong in your ground.
Other Tasks
Depending on the sort of landscape and gardens you’ll be preparing for the upcoming winter, there are any number of other tasks you may want to consider as the fall season carries on. Taking care of cracks in your asphalt or concrete driveway or walkways, for instance, is always a good task to handle before the snow falls.
So too is sitting down with a stack of magazines and a notebook and deciding what it is you’d like to plant when the spring season finally arrives. Fall is also a good time to prune any overgrown trees or shrubs, especially those that may damage your property during heavy storms if they aren’t trimmed back now.
Your One-Stop Shop for Supplies
Regardless of the sort of fall landscape prep work you’ll be undertaking, Woodward Landscape Supply has literally everything you may possibly need to complete your various fall projects. In fact, in order to enable us to meet the demands of our growing market, we’ve expanded our facility from just over one acre to five acres. As you can probably imagine, this expansion has enabled us to dramatically increase both our inventory and our display areas.
We’re located at 661 Schuylkill Road (Route 724) in Phoenixville, PA, where we look forward to serving literally all your landscape supply needs. Spend some time on our website to learn more about our company and the various product lines we offer, or simply give us a call or pay us a visit in person today. We think you’ll be very pleasantly surprised by what you see.