If you love the beauty and added curb appeal of a home garden but you’re not blessed with a green thumb, hiring a garden maintenance company in northern NJ is a great idea.
A professional garden maintenance company can give you a beautiful year-round garden and take care of all of the necessary planting and maintenance services for a thriving home garden.
Creating and maintaining a well-manicured, healthy garden takes time, energy, knowledge and commitment. Often, the most beautiful gardens and landscapes are the work of a professional garden service. Many garden maintenance companies offer services that go well beyond simple gardening. They handle landscape services that range from weekly lawn mowing to building outdoor features like swimming pools, spas, patios, outdoor kitchens and fireplaces. Hiring a garden maintenance company in northern NJ can provide many benefits for you and your home.
More Time
If you have been doing your own gardening and landscape work, you realize how much time and effort is necessary to keep things looking good. If you have a large Bergen County property, lawn and garden care can feel like a full-time task. Even if you have a small yard that doesn’t require a lot of upkeep, a garden needs special year-round care that goes beyond routine lawn care. Minimal garden care like planting and pruning can take up an entire weekend, interfering with personal and family commitments. If your job requires long hours, spending every free weekend doing gardening maintenance probably isn’t at the top of your to-do list. If you want a beautiful home garden, it’s important to weigh your time commitments against paying a professional garden maintenance company in northern NJ. You may find that the costs of professional gardening services is well-worth it so you can free up your time for family and other activities you really enjoy.
The Right Equipment
In addition to the time, effort and physical labor required to maintain a garden, you need the right gardening tools and equipment. DIY lawn and garden care requires you to invest in a lot of equipment to get the job done properly. Purchasing all this equipment can add up to hundreds, even thousands of dollars over time, so you should weigh your equipment costs against professional garden maintenance costs for your home. In addition to larger equipment like a lawn mower, leaf blower and fertilizer spreader, you’ll need to invest in smaller gardening tools:
- Shovel – For planting trees and shrubs and mixing large quantities of dirt, compost and similar materials.
- Hand Pruner – Used to remove small dead and unwanted branches from trees and shrubs.
- Hand Trowel – Handy for digging holes in garden containers and beds, mixing compost into soil and adding fertilizer and plant food.
- Leaf Rake – Best for gathering leaves and lawn clippings and spreading mulch and other ground-covering materials around planting beds.
- Garden Rake – Works best for planting beds, pressing sown seeds into soil and removing dead grass from lawn.
- Garden Hose With Sprayer – Necessary for transporting large quantities of water from an outdoor tap to other areas of your lawn and garden.
- String Trimmer – Essential for clipping grass and weeds in hard-to-mow areas, such as along edges, walls and fences.
In addition, plan to purchase a good quality hedge trimmer, edger, hoe, hole digger, pruner, tree trimmer, sturdy wheel barrow, tall ladder, several buckets and durable work gloves. Wouldn’t it be easier, and maybe cheaper, to hire a qualified garden maintenance company in northern NJ to handle the work?
Professional Knowledge
Lawn and garden professionals have extensive knowledge of gardening procedures and products that are essential to create a healthy, thriving garden. Unless you’re prepared to spend your time learning about thousands of types of plants and flowers, planting and pruning techniques, fertilizers, pesticides and overall garden maintenance, you should hire a qualified garden maintenance company in northern NJ who can provide proper garden care. A professional garden service will know how to best care for your plants, which types of flowers and plants will thrive in your garden, when to put down fertilizer and how to diagnose distressed and diseased plants.
- Proper Planting – Choosing the right plants and proper planting techniques are essential to a successful garden. Understanding proper soil conditions, proper watering, sun and shade requirements and seasonal garden maintenance takes extensive knowledge. Based on the specific species, trees, shrubs, plants and flowers all have different growth patterns and care requirements. A professional garden service has knowledgeable technicians who care provide the best year-round care for your garden.
- Fertilizers – Most soils are not fertile enough to supply adequate nutrients for a healthy lawn and garden. The soil in most northern NJ areas is depleted of proper nutrients – nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium – required to keep your lawn and garden green and healthy. Fertilizers and plant foods must be added to promote healthy growth and strong roots, but using the right fertilizer is essential. Otherwise, your grass and plants can suffer from “fertilizer burn,” which can result in yellowing, brown patches and dead grass and plants.
- Pesticides – There’s a variety of herbicides and pesticides on the market, each offering specific results for diseased plants caused by insects and small animals in your garden. Learning about the different types of herbicides and pesticides on the market is a big task, so it’s best to leave these products to a garden maintenance company in northern NJ who knows the pros and cons of each product and which product is best for your garden maintenance.
- Organic Gardening – Lawn care professionals can provide organic gardening care that offers natural benefits for your landscape and garden. Organic gardening focuses on care with natural, organic products that are safe for your family, pets and home environment. As a DIY gardener, it will take a lot of time and experimentation to find the right organic products for your garden.
- Aeration – Proper aeration will ensure that your soil is not compacted so that it can provide adequate oxygen, water, nutrients and drainage for a healthy garden. Sometimes soil plugs need to be removed with special equipment, and professional landscape and garden technicians are skilled in proper aeration procedures and equipment. They can test your soil conditions and provide ways to improve them if necessary.
Regular Maintenance
After your garden is planted, it will require regular maintenance to keep plants healthy and flowers blooming year-round. Routine garden maintenance takes time and effort, even with the smallest garden, so hiring a garden maintenance company in northern NJ will provide necessary maintenance on a regular schedule. Typical gardening maintenance includes:
Deadheading
Most flowers benefit from having their spent flowers removed. This is called deadheading. Flowers that bloom repeatedly will only bloom again if the old, dying flowers are removed. If old blooms remain on the plant, they will go to seed and stop producing flowers. Sometimes it’s best to remove only the spent flower bud, but when each flower is on its own stem, it’s often better to deadhead the entire flowering stem.
Pinching
Some plants have very crisp, thin stems that can be deadheaded using your fingers instead of pruning shears. This type of deadheading is known as pinching. For coleus plants, grown for their foliage not their flowers, pinching encourages plants to grow fuller and bushier. Pinching fall blooming perennials early in their growth season will prevent them from becoming too tall and promote added blooms. Pinching plants aster and mums will move their bloom time back by several weeks. This will provide new blooms in late September, when other blooms are starting to die down.
Pruning
When a plant’s older leaves start to look worn, it’s time to prune the foliage back either to where there is still fresh growth or all the way back to new basal growth (growth at the base of the plant). Many new gardeners and DIY lawn care providers don’t understand proper pruning techniques and the benefits they provide for plants and flowers. Pruning and cutting back can be used to reshape plants so they will grow in a different way. Some plants, especially fall bloomers, will grow tall and gangly. If they’re not cut back, they will not be able to support their own weight, so they will begin to droop or bend. A professional garden maintenance company in northern NJ will know the best time to prune and cut back without damaging plants and growth patterns.
Garden Design Services
By hiring a professional garden maintenance company in northern NJ, you may have access to qualified garden designers who can help you create the garden of your dreams. Professional garden designers have extensive knowledge and experience in the different species of plants and flowers, their growth requirements, planting times and necessary care. They can help you with many valuable garden services for your home:
- Annual and Perennial Garden Design
- Container and Window-Box Plantings
- Raised and In-Ground Flower Beds
- Seasonal Bulb Plantings
- Garden Renovations and Upgrades
- Fall and Winter Plantings and Displays
- Holiday Lighting and Decorating
