Cold days are coming, so it’s time to say goodbye to outdoor care and move all your attention inside, right? Many homeowners say goodbye to their landscape professionals for a few months after the final fall clean-up, but to best protect your curb appeal, maintaining professional landscape care over the winter is the best strategy for a healthy and beautiful property year-round. Rather than focusing solely on snow and ice removal, having a comprehensive winter landscape maintenance plan will ensure that your home is ready to thrive next spring.
While there is nothing like a garden bed exploding with blooms and color, a well-maintained winter landscape can have a quiet elegance. Evergreens, holly bushes, and well-maintained, sheltered beds can often look beautiful, even when covered in snow. During the holiday season, well-maintained landscaping is far easier to decorate, and outdoor lighting will highlight the care you put into your property.
Maintaining a landscape in winter requires far less effort and attention than landscape maintenance does in the spring, but that doesn’t mean it should be ignored completely. The primary reason to keep up with winter maintenance is that your property will be set for a healthy and vibrant spring. Instead of spending spring days fixing the damage to trees, shrubs, and beds from winter storms, cleaning up debris, and trying to nurse uninsulated beds back to life, your yard will be ready to grow. Keeping up with winter maintenance will also allow your landscape professionals to quickly address any issues that may arise, while they are still easy to fix.
Just because winter isn’t the growing season doesn’t mean your plants don’t need attention. Many people don’t think about it, but the salt that is used on driveways, paths, and roads to keep your family safe from slipping on ice can be fatal to trees, plants, and shrubs that are close to roads, paths, driveways, and sidewalks. Even if you’re careful to avoid getting salt from getting on the plants directly, the residue from any snow or ice that had been salt-treated can show up as damage in the spring.
Shrubs and beds can be covered to protect them from the elements. Adding a thick layer of mulch will not only protect your plantings from winter damage, but it can also provide a layer of insulation that helps the roots stay warm and maintain sufficient moisture throughout the dormant season. Certain plants may require additional protection over the winter, and a landscape professional can advise you on where to take extra steps.
Once the warm weather rolls around again in the spring, your focus should be on starting the new growing season strong, not repairing damage from the winter. While the hope is to get through the winter without issue, some maintenance tasks need to be kept up with.
Most homeowners who value their curb appeal, property value, and landscaping will hire a professional landscape maintenance contractor during the spring and summer months, but not every homeowner maintains that relationship throughout the winter. Even though your property needs less attention in the winter, it’s a good idea to keep your landscape maintenance contractor year-round. Many landscape contractors will offer year-round contracts. With this year-round relationship, you will not only receive excellent care and maintenance during the growing season, but you will also have someone monitoring your property when damage is most likely to occur due to winter storms. They can keep your property looking well-maintained and will make sure that you don’t need to spend the first days of spring playing catch-up.
Curb appeal is essential, but it doesn’t stop when the growing season does. With the right care over the winter season, your yard can be just as beautiful in the winter months as it is in the spring and summer. A landscape maintenance contractor will make sure that your curb appeal never drops, not even when the temperature does.
Your curb appeal doesn’t have to take a backseat this winter. With the proper care, your landscape can stay neat, protected, and ready for spring. Contact Twin Oaks Landscape today to learn more about our winter maintenance services or to get started with a year-round plan.