Following a landscape maintenance checklist and lawn care are two essential parts of making your home look welcoming and well-kept. An unkempt yard can make your outdoor space seem overgrown and off-putting. However, landscaping isn’t a one-time undertaking. Someone must maintain your lawn year-round, which means keeping track of everything that needs work.
Every good landscaper has a mental or physical checklist to make sure they’ve covered everything that needs done during seasonal landscape maintenance. We’ve created this helpful landscape maintenance guide to help you stay on top of your landscape maintenance and seasonal landscaping tasks.
Landscape Maintenance Checklist for Spring
Warmer weather brings sunnier skies, birds, flowers, and a demanding level of landscape maintenance. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed, but if you stick to our checklist, you can handle basic landscape maintenance tasks in no time.
Spring tends to be the busiest time for landscape maintenance services since people often rush to get their landscape looking nice after the winter months. Farmers and gardeners are in a hurry to get their irrigation systems up and running so they can get their crops started as soon as possible. Herbicides and weed-killers need to be applied. The mess left behind from winter needs to be cleaned up.
Here are a few things you can do on your own so that your landscaping doesn’t end up looking too bad when they’re gone.
- Charge your irrigation systems, turn them on, check for repairs, and call someone to fix them if need be. Make sure to set the correct times and dates for your irrigation
controller. - Clean up the yard so that any out-of-place items or fallen tree branches are out of the
way. - Clean your gardens and flower beds of weeds, so they don’t spread and desired plants have room to grow.
- Clean, start up, and, if needed, repair any water features.
- Fertilize your plants, lawns, and gardens. Make sure your lawns get properly watered
and aerated as well. - Clean up fallen leaves that can smother grass and other plants.
- Remove any snow, ice, or slush that winter may have left behind.
- Check for places that winter salt may have damaged and make plans to re-seed if
necessary.
Landscape Maintenance in Summer
All of that busy work and landscape maintenance you did in spring is just the beginning. In reality, it’s mostly prep work for the real landscape maintenance season—Summer. Now that you’ve cared for your lawns, cleared debris, and prepared fields and gardens, it’s time to
start the main job.
Summer is known for hot weather, green lawns, and long days. It’s rare to drive through the suburbs on a warm sunny day without seeing at least one person cutting their lawn. Summer’s
typical weather conditions allow plants, grass, and weeds to thrive. That means you’ll need routine (probably weekly) landscape maintenance and lawn care.
Many things need to be maintained and routinely tended to in summer, so here’s what you’ll need to do:
- Frequent lawn mowing to keep the grass healthy and at a reasonable length, as well as
weed whacking along the edges to make sure undesirable plants don’t spread. - Make sure any trash, debris, or litter gets picked up as soon as possible.
- Tend the irrigation systems the same way you would in Spring, adjusting for hotter
weather conditions. - Remove dead blooms from flowers and weed gardens.
- Trim overgrown plants as needed to make sure they have adequate space.
- Attend and trim hedges, bushes, and shrubs as needed.
- Remove rodents, insects, and other undesired pests.
Landscape Maintenance in Fall
As autumn approaches, the busy landscaping work of summer slows down. That doesn’t mean your work is over, though. Fall is notorious for pumpkins, chilly breezes, colorful trees, and falling leaves. That means you’ll need to rake up leaves routinely. In the months before winter, you must take care that your landscaping maintenance doesn’t go to waste and get destroyed over the winter.
Preparing landscapes for winter involves many things, so here’s a landscape maintenance checklist for fall:
- Routinely clean up leaves and other debris. If you don’t, small wildlife (like box turtles
and salamanders) may start making their homes under the coverage. - Check your irrigation systems one last time before draining them and turning them off for
the winter. - Continue removing weeds as needed.
- Continue pruning perennials, so they stay healthy.
- Aerate and fertilize fields and lawns one last time.
Landscape Maintenance in Winter
Your landscape maintenance subsides a bit in winter, but that doesn’t mean your work is done. Colder days mean you’ll only have a small bit of low-maintenance landscaping to do. Irrigation systems should be turned off and put away by this point, so you don’t need to check on those. The lower amount of landscape maintenance in winter makes it the perfect time to redo landscaping and deep-clean anything that needs it.
Here are a few other things to tend to in winter:
- Make sure one last time that fall maintenance is entirely finished before snowfall.
- Shovel snow as needed.
- Maintain paved areas by removing snow and ice.