There’s nothing like a beautiful landscape and garden to add a picturesque setting to your home. Stunning garden areas filled with colorful flowers, blooming plants and fragrant scents will instantly add curb appeal and beauty to your landscape.
Although every homeowner wants a lovely garden, most homeowners don’t want the garden maintenance that comes with it. Maintaining a green, healthy landscape and garden requires a year-round commitment to garden maintenance services.
If you have dreamed of a picturesque garden landscape for your Northern New Jersey home, consider hiring a professional landscape company with horticulture knowledge, landscaping experience and important seasonal plant care maintenance.
Professional Garden Care and Maintenance
When you hire a professional landscape company, like Borst Landscape & Design, you get a team of educated and experienced garden specialists to help you with garden maintenance services such as:
- Spring Garden Cleanup
- Fall Garden Cleanup and Cut-back
- Pruning and Deadheading for Annuals and Perennials
- Custom Pruning for Other Garden Plants
- Fertilization for Annuals and Perennials
- Weeding and Cultivating for Garden Beds
- Garden Disease and Insect Control
Borst garden specialists can help you design a beautiful garden landscape and provide year-round garden maintenance services to keep it healthy and lush.
Whether you want lush and green blooming plants that border your front walkway, or colorful annuals and perennials that add beauty to your back yard, our knowledgeable garden designers can help you create the perfect garden landscape.
With backgrounds and professional experience in horticulture, our garden designers are very knowledgeable about seasonal requirements that impact garden beauty, plant growth and year-round garden health.
Seasonal Care and Maintenance Requirements
Spring Season: (March – May)
Spring is a major growth season for everything in your landscape and garden. Your grass, plants, shrubs and trees are beginning to sprout new buds and green growth at a rapid growth rate. Spring is an important season to jump-start healthy new growth after a cold Bergen County winter.
Spring garden maintenance services should include:
Spring Yard Cleanup
When warm weather arrives, it’s important to focus on cleaning up your landscape to get rid of dead winter growth and debris. You need to rake up dead, dry leaves and remove debris like fallen twigs, branches, tree limbs, rocks and trash as quickly as possible.
Any debris left in your landscape will smother grass and plants, invite weed growth, and attract outdoor insects and pests that can cause garden damages.
Planting
If you planted spring-flowering bulbs, check to see where your bulbs are planted if you didn’t mark them. This will keep you from destroying your bulbs if you choose to plant annuals and perennials in the same garden bed.
Spring is a good time to dig up and divide emerging perennials, move dormant plants, and plant dormant shrubs and trees.
Fertilization
Early spring is a prime time to fertilize your plants. Proper fertilization will provide much needed nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium and iron that were depleted during the winter.
For strong roots and healthy growth, it’s important to choose the right type of garden fertilizer. An organic or light, slow-release fertilizer will jump-start plant growth with a more gentle approach than chemical-based fertilizers.
Pruning
Pruning provides important garden maintenance services in the spring. You should prune spring-flowering plants in late spring immediately after blooms fade. Since flowers are usually produced on old growth, pruning soon after blooms fade will maximize flower production the next year.
Prune summer-flowering plants and trees in late spring or early summer before they start to bloom. In late spring, their bare limbs will make it easier to examine the structure of the plant and make proper cuts. Any pruning mistakes will quickly be concealed with new summer growth. Spring is also a good time to cut back perennials to ground level.
Weed and Pest Control
Weeds – Spring brings abundant new growth, but it also brings abundant weeds. Aggressive weeds like crabgrass, thatch, foxtails, dandelions and creeping weed varieties typically invade at the onset of warm weather. You will need a pre-emergent herbicide with garden maintenance services in early spring to prevent aggressive weed growth.
Pest Control – As soon as spring arrives, insects and outdoor pests will attack new green plant growth. To protect your garden areas, you will need pesticide applications in early spring to prevent damages. Before spring arrives, talk to a Bergen County landscape professional about proper weed control and an Integrated Pest Management Program (IPM) that focuses on organic solutions for pest control.
Summer Season: (June – August)
Northern NJ summers bring welcome sunshine, but they also bring unwelcome heat, weeds and bugs that can destroy your perfect garden landscape. During the summer season, you should focus on proper planting, irrigation, weeding and insect and pest control.
Summer garden maintenance services should include:
Planting
Once summer heat arrives, many spring-blooming annuals such as pansies, violas and mums quickly begin to fade. To refresh your garden, pull out the spent plants and replace them with heat-loving varieties like lantanas, coleus, pentas, salvias and zinnias.
Heat-loving annuals grow quickly in warm temperatures and will provide a beautiful burst of brilliant color in your garden. Summer bulbs such as callas, cannas, and dahlias will also add color and texture to your garden through the summer.
Mulch
Spreading a 2-inch-deep layer of mulch over your soil is one of the best things you can do for your summer garden. Mulch acts like a blanket that shields the soil from hot, summer sun. Soil temperatures stay cooler and wetter, so your plant roots absorb more nutrients and water.
Organic mulches, like bark chips, shredded wood, pine straw, and grass clippings will protect your garden plants and add good natural matter back into your garden soil.
Irrigation
As a general rule, you should provide about one inch of water for your garden and landscape each week. It can come from natural rainfall or an irrigation system, but it’s essential for healthy growth during summer heat.
When watering, deep and infrequent watering is better than frequent, short applications. Deep watering promotes stronger, deeper root systems for plants, so they can reach farther underground for water during summer heat when soil dries out quickly.
Weed Control
Plants and flowers grow faster during the summer, but so do weeds. Aggressive weeds will take every opportunity to invade your landscape and garden, especially if proper weed control was not implemented in the spring.
Summer weeds can be difficult to get rid of, so you may need a post-emergent herbicide treatment as part of summer garden maintenance services to keep them under control.
A professional landscape contractor can make sure the right herbicides are used in proper quantities to prevent damage to your garden.
Lawn Diseases and Pest Control
Keep an eye out for signs of lawn diseases and outdoor pest problems during the summer. Mid-summer gardens are particularly vulnerable to common Northern NJ lawn diseases like black spot, powdery mildew and rust.
Also watch for common pests like Japanese beetles, chinch bugs, grub worms, army worms, grasshoppers, caterpillars and fire ants around your garden. Once harmful insects and pests invade, it doesn’t take long for them to destroy your garden landscape.
Fall Season: (September – November)
As the weather cools down, your garden and landscape plants will slow down in growth. Fall is the time to clean up garden beds and minimize problems for the next spring growth season. You should concentrate on getting rid of dead summer growth and preparing your garden landscape areas for winter.
Fall garden maintenance services should include:
Fall Yard Cleanup
To prepare for winter, clean up your garden areas before cold weather arrives. As cooler fall temperatures arrive, plant growth starts to decline. It’s important to rake up dead dry or wet leaves, get rid of debris, and deadhead plants before winter.
Planting
Although spring and summer are prime planting periods, fall is a great time to plant spring-blooming bulbs and perennials. All spring-blooming bulbs require a period of cold dormancy to produce healthy blooms, so planting bulbs in the fall will produce beautiful display in the spring. If rabbits, raccoons and deer frequent your Bergen County landscape, plant bulbs they don’t like to nibble, like daffodils, grape hyacinths, Siberian squills, snowdrops, alliums and English bluebells. Fall is also a good time to plant cool-season flowers like pansies and peonies.
Organic Compost
Since most soils in Bergen County landscapes don’t contain proper nutrients for garden plants, organic compost can return essential nutrients to your soil. Whether you have a sandy, silt, or clay soil, organic compost will create a healthy, richer soil by promoting beneficial micro-organisms. Talk to your landscape professional about the many benefits of organic compost and organic lawn care and garden maintenance services for your home.
Winter Season: (December – February)
Although it’s tempting to retreat indoors when the weather turns cold, your garden and landscape still need care and maintenance. Use the winter season to keep your landscape well-maintained, so new plant growth will be green and healthy when the spring season rolls around.
Winter garden maintenance services should include:
- Reduce watering for dormant plants to discourage winter foliage growth that can be damaged by a hard winter freeze.
- Provide extra winter protection for garden plants, newly planted perennials and shrubs and trees with thick mulch.
- Move dormant perennials inside or to a sheltered location to prevent freezing. You can transfer delicate plants to containers and move them to the garage or the house for warmth until spring, then replant them outdoors.
Regular Lawn Care and Maintenance
In addition to seasonal garden maintenance services, regular lawn care and maintenance is also important. It will help to prevent overgrowth, weeds, lawn diseases and outdoor pests that can cause significant damages to your landscape and garden areas.
Hiring a professional landscape company for regular lawn care and maintenance will provide weekly services that include:
- Lawn mowing
- Weeding
- Border edging of walkways and driveways
- Cleaning of walkways and driveways
- Spring yard cleanup for removal of winter debris and dead plant growth
- Fall yard cleanup for removal of dead summer growth and winter preparation
As a Northern NJ homeowner, you deserve a beautiful garden and landscape that enhances the beauty of your home. Talk to the landscape professionals at Borst Landscapes about year-round garden maintenance services, organic lawn care and regular lawn care and maintenance for a healthy, green outdoor environment.