14 Tips to Spring Clean Your Long Island Landscape

14 Tips to Spring Clean Your Long Island Landscape

Springtime has finally arrived to Nassau and Suffolk Counties in New York. Now's the time to inventory your outdoor living spaces to see what needs a hand getting back into shape.

Additionally, it's imperative to focus on cleaning up your entire property this year, from your gardens, to your lawn, to your hardscapes. The winter of 2013-2014 dragged on in Long Island, and your property will need some extra landscape maintenance because of it.

14 tips for landscape spring cleaning this spring

1. Clean up any branches, limbs, or any other tree debris from your yard.
2. Prune back any trees or shrubs. Remember not to prune back flowering trees and shrubs that depend on old wood to bloom.
3. Additionally, prune off any dead or winter-killed branches and limbs from your trees and shrubs.
4. Spruce up your perennials. Remove last year's growth and cut back any plants that didn't get trimmed last fall.
5. Transplant your perennials. Take a look around your flower beds and rock gardens to decide where you'll be splitting and moving your perennials to create a different look this spring.
6. Prepare your flower gardens for beautiful blooms this spring and summer:
7. Now's the time to fertilize your flower gardens.
8. It's also time to clean out weeds left over from last year or any new weeds that started growing in your garden this year.
9. Consider starting new flower beds by breaking up the ground, removing sod, and building raised beds. Now's the time to plant pansies for some early spring color. Pansies come in a variety of colors, such as blacks, deep purples, blues, and yellows. They look great in containers as well as in the ground within flower beds and along walkways.
10. And it's also time to plant trees and bulbs in your gardens and landscapes too.
11. Apply mulch around trees and in gardens.
12. Apply horticultural oil to your trees to protect them from insects and disease.
13. Consider hiring a professional landscape service to complete the above jobs. They know the amount, the timing, and the products involved in preparing your landscape for the spring and summer seasons.
14. A landscape professional does more than work on your plants, shrubs and trees. He also will be able to clean, re-sand, and seal your paving stones to remove algae, car oil, and cooking grease from your hardscape surfaces too.

Obviously, there's a lot to do this spring season to recover from this year's harsh winter. If you live in Nassau or Suffolk County, New York, call Autumn Leaf Landscape Design, today, to schedule a Spring Open program. You can reach Autumn Leaf Landscape at 631-424-5544 or send us a message on our contact page.

Resources

1. Autumn Leaf Landscape Design, Inc.

2. About.com: Landscaping. “Spring Cleaning for Lawns and Landscaping

3. About.com: Landscaping. “Preparing Planting Beds in Spring

4. About.com: Landscaping. “Best Time to Prune Shrubs?