Month: January 2020

A beautiful home deserves to have a beautiful lawn. Although pretty to look at, a perfect lawn demands a lot of cumbersome chores, as anybody who has ever owned a house would know. Lawn maintenance is a perpetual pain that leaves little room for slacking or relaxing. The only way to get away is to hand over the task to professionals. But even in hiring a lawn care company, there are things to consider and judgement to make.

In the passages below, we have broken down for you the prospect of hiring a grounds maintenance company in Ohio into three Q and A sections.

How to Choose a Lawn Care Company?

Out of so many lawn care companies, singling one out can be quite a challenge. So, to cut it short, you need to follow some points of consideration. Here are the things to focus on when choosing a landscaping contractor.

• Reputation:There are many providers in the market today, some better than the others. Your mission should be to pick one that has a good reputation among clients. For that, you can look online for the kind of reviews a business gets or ask your neighbors to find out what kind of reputation it keeps.
• License: Only the licensed lawn care guys are professionally trained and certified to do the job.
• Insurance: The company you want working on your turf should be insured so that you are not the one held responsible for injuries or damages at work.
• Customer Service: Try investing in a company that has a decent customer service.
• Price: The most reliable companies often have the most reasonable pricing. Keep that in mind.

Why Hire a Lawn Care Service?

For some DIY lawn maintenance is not an option. Even for DIYers, it’s an ambitious project that demands not only time and a knack, but also tools. Here are some reasons why you want to hire lawn care service instead of doing it yourself.

1. The biggest reason is that it will save you a lot of time. If your lawn is not in its best shape, it can take several weekends to restore, weekends that you can spend with your family or just kick back and relax.
2. Like most things, there is a knack to gardening too. Most people new to it find themselves hitting a wall within the first hour of the job. Without skills, there is a good chance for the entire thing to go wrong. So, you want to leave it to the professionals who have both training and a knack for it.
3. The cost of professional lawn care is very little compared to the amount of work that goes into it. By trying to do it yourself, you will end up spending the service cost many times over just in accumulating the right tools and supplies. So, there is not much use to it if saving money is the motivation.
4. One last reason for hiring professional help is to dodge the liability. Lawn contractors are insured against damages and injuries during work. You as a homeowner do not have that coverage. So, on event of an accident, it is wholly your responsibility.

How to Find a Lawn Care Service

There are many ways of finding a lawn care service near you. You can do a quick Google search to find a full list of companies operating within a certain radius from your location. You can also ask your neighbors or your coworkers for recommendations. You can check the traders’ directory or look on Craigslist for names and numbers of the local landscapers.

Up north, Ohio receives a good amount of snow and rain whereas down south, the weather is moderate with occasional rain and snow. That makes caring for lawns a seasonal job for most homeowners. Since snow is common in winter in all parts of the state, lawn maintenance is more of a thing of spring and summer in Ohio. If you have a lawn that you like to keep lush and handsome in the warm months, then cutting the grass timely is the way to do it. But, oftentimes, having great lawn guys does not prove sufficient when you are not sure how often should you cut your grass. While trusting the landscapers with the maintenance is a wise thing to do, it’s always better to know things yourself.

Here are some tips that can help you calculate the exact time when your lawn grass will need cutting again.

Know the Cutting Height

The reason you want to rely on professional lawn mower to do the cutting and trimming is because industrial equipment deliver infinitely better results than domestic mowers and shears. Those equipment are better adapted to the conditions of different grasses. So the question here is how high should you cut your grass?

On an average, 2 to 3 inches is a good cutting height, but it also depends on the type of grass you have in your lawn. Perennial Ryegrass and Kentucky Bluegrass look best when cut at 2 to 2.5 inches. With tall fescues, you can go slightly higher at 2.5 to 3 inches. The said height is good for spring through autumn when the weather is warm and occasionally wet.

Galena Lawn Care has experts onboard who have specialized knowledge about different grass types and training in mowing them perfectly.

The Right Mowing Schedule

There is no such thing as a one perfect schedule that works for all lawns. Even inside Ohio, the soil varies in fertility and composition. That makes it more a question of the right mowing schedule for individual lawns as opposed to the one mowing schedule that works for all lawns.

You will know that it’s time to mow out your lawn when it starts to look willowy and a bit out of shape. Some people make the mistake of cutting the grass too short to keep the grass from growing back too soon. So, in order to have a decent interval in between cuttings, how tall should you cut your grass?

The problem with cutting the grass too short is that the whole lawn will look dried out and yellow till the blades grow an inch back. So, the ideal time is between one and two weeks. Wait anywhere between seven to fourteen days to mow the lawn, and when you do,make sure to keep the blade setting at the middle to give the grass a medium length.

When It Rains

Rain is common in all parts of Ohio. In winter, the days it does not snow, it rains. In summer too, it rains now and then. While precipitation is good for vegetation, it puts the house owners in a bit of a fix. Everybody who owns a lawn knows that it’s not the best thing to mow the grass after a rain. So, what’s the ideal thing to do when it rains every other day?

You don’t want to mow a wet lawn for two reasons, tall and wet grass can overwork the mowers causing it to overheat. Especially if the grass is tall and very wet, you want to wait out till its dry again. Second, mowing a wet lawn can cause the grass to clump the mower deck. The mower can also make the soft soil muddy after a rain. So, the best thing to do is to wait until the grass is reasonable dry. Take a quick walk and check your shoes. If your shoes come out dry, it’s good to mow.

Lawns love trees. Unlike dwarf specimens that only contribute to chromatic enhancements, large trees add color, design and texture to a landscape. But trees alone won’t do. The tall trunk, the heavy branches, the dense canopy too need a little dressing up. Luckily, there are some easy ways of doing that, and you don’t need to have the skills of a prodigal landscaper for it. Anyone can do it, and once finished, your garden will be the envy of the neighborhood. If you feel its too much work then you can seek help from a professional.

Below are some easy to implement ideas of dressing up the tall trees in your landscape.

Bricks and Rocks

Want to keep it really simple? There’s a way to dress up trees without going through too much trouble. That involves bricks and rocks. It’d be great to have a yard cart at hand for the moving, but a couple of extra hands would do too. Make a border around the trees using large rocks or bricks, whichever you prefer. For a commercial edging finish, keep the rocks small to medium. A round border looks good but feel free to get creative. As long as there is a distance of 10 inches between the border and the trunk, any style could work.

Ground-cover Monoculture

Here is another very simple trick of dressing up trees in yards. Pick a variety of flowering groundcover and make a flowerbed around the trunk. Vinca vine, periwinkle, Bugleweed, Canadian Anemone, creeping thyme, there are so many options to choose from. Once the flowerbed is installed, the plants start blooming soon after. Easy-care and heavy-duty, these low-growing plants fill up the grounds they cover with glossy green foliage and vibrant pastel blooms. They make quite a sight.

A Mix of Colors

To take ground cover idea to the next level, go for mixed flowerbeds. You do not have to pick different species of plants for this because that would complicate the care routine. Instead, pick one plant, but to keep the variety going, mix up the flower colors. So, if your choice of plant is begonia, pick white, red and pink ones for one tree or a mass of periwinkles for another. The similarity of habit, height and foliage texture will give the bed a more cohesive look. The color scheme will keep it visually interesting and exciting.

Ferns for Multi-stems

There is a large mass of people out there who love ferns. If you are one of them, then there is a very easy way to stage up the trees in your lawn with your favorite undergrowth. A quick tip is to favor multi-stem trees for this dressing. Ferns look heavenly with them. There are few things so overwhelmingly refreshing than the sight of fresh fern growths around a multi-stem tree. Its instant color and texture. In fall, they turn color and ramp up the visuals even further.

A Simple Mulch Bed

A very smart way to dress up your trees while caring for them is mulching. Mulch supplies garden vegetation with essential nutrients. So, they make an indispensable part of the care routine. But mulch can also double as landscape enhancement if done the right way. Pick your favorite kind of mulch and it could be anything from wood chips to pine straws and cover the ground around the trees with it. This will tidy up the surroundings while keeping the trees well-nourished. You can top it up by arbitrarily placing some rocks or sporadically planting some low-growing plants on the mulch bed if you like.

There are few pleasures in life that compare to the joy of gardening. So right on and let your creativity take over.