Pruning your own Trees

Pruning your own trees can be scary because you want to do it right, and if you do it wrong there is no going back. A good booklet to help home owners prune their trees is through Green Team Management's Certified Arborist, Ted Smith. This booklet goes beyond the usual structural diagrams and teaches you how a tree grows so you can make those difficult pruning decisions that do not look like the perfect diagrams pictures. Well illustrated you can find it at www.diylawntime.blogspot.com or www.treeseminar.blogspot.com

Leaves Frozen to the Ground

The quick freeze caught many trees by surprise with their leaves still on. The other issue are leaves frozen to the ground. So how do we get these leaves cleaned up? The EZ way is to wait until spring to deal with the mess. However you may get a break in the weather with a warm up allowing you to get to those leaves, but now they are compacted on the ground. Here is a good trick, you can get an adapter for your mower for lawn thatching that goes on your lawn mower. This is either a blade with a spring wire or wires that go on the front of your mower like this.

The front mount will tear at the leaves and eventually get jammed with leaves but just keep going, it still will disrupt the leaves frozen to the ground enough to be able to pick them up. The blade version is best and it will also dethatch your lawn. This will mean you bag will fill up very fast, so to make it EZ, get a dozen small cheap tarps and put them out on the lawn, dump your bag on these tarps as you go, then take the tarps to the dumping area or throw them in a pickup all at once to speed things up. video demo at www.diylawntime.blogspot.com

What did this quick freeze do to your yard?

This quick freeze will only hurt your plants and turf if they have not hardned off. If your area had warm weather like the NW did this last month, the plants were still transpiring and a quick freeze did do some frost burn. This will include the elongation of the stems, evergreen foil edges. There isn't anything you can do at this time to correct the problem other than wait until spring and restore the health of the plant. Turf blades that are frozen can break when they are driven over by heavy weighted vehicles. If the snow came down and blanketed the grass before the deep freeze you will find the grass has spring and bendable under the snow. But if the grass was frozen quickly it will be stiff and break off. If your tree pruning service comes in and drives on that grass it will break and be brown in the spring. Grass is resilient and will recover within a month or two after the spring thaw as the new blade grows. But if you do not want that look in the spring, keep the heavy trucks off of it. Often the tree company will put plywood down and tell you this will prevent that, it will help by distributing the weight but it still depends on how frozen the grass blade was.

Less lawn growth, less work for you.

If you wait until your lawn is this tall, mulching will not work. If you use a lawn company to fertilize your lawn, they will try and make it grow tall fast to keep it green, but this means a lot more work for you. You need to take over your own fertilizer if you want a green lawn that is easy to maintain.

This really isn't that tough but it does add a step to the process. You'll make up for it enough savings to buy more Kool-Aid while laying in the hammock so it's worth it. Buy a cheap little broadcast fertilizer spreader. Buy some Slow Release fertilizer. Now only use 20% of what they recommend but put it down every time you mow. Get the spreader that you can keep it from spreading over onto the sidewalk or get good enough with it so you can control that. What you are now doing is giving the lawn a little bit of fertilizer, just enough to keep green but not so much that it shoots up too tall to mow without a bag. This little trick is easier than you think because if you kind of blow it one week, you'll fix it the next week because you are never using so much fertilizer that you can burn the lawn and you won't stripe the lawn. Now that you have less growth each week, the clippings are going into the lawn and actually adding some organic fertilizer too which helps to balance the lawns health. These are simple steps but they really make yard care easier. If you have that big 20 thousand square feet, you better have a riding mower, and with that riding mower you can attach the fertilizer cart to the back and simply pull it around. Every time you fertilize you'll change the directions you use so the lawn gets and even balance.

EZ care yard

I have to admit, I want a beautiful yard but I don't want to have to work like a dog to get it. So here are some tips I've come up with over the years that have made my yard so much easier to handle. This may or may not work for you but if it saves an hour a week, well that is awesome hammock time, big smile. First order of business is making sure you have the right tool for the job. If your yard is a couple thousand square feet or if it's twenty thousand square feet, you need to make sure you aren't mowing the twenty thousand with a push mower. AND, if you have a mower that doesn't want to start, then you will use as much energy pulling that stupid rope as mowing the entire lawn.

So let's get the mower rolling first. If it doesn't start on the second pull, you need to do some adjusting. Putting the mower away with bad gas is often the problem, fouls up the carburetor so it doesn't want to work right. Using "leaded" gas is also important because this modern stuff with ethanol will have some water in it that can cause problems. If you can't find leaded gas, try and find non-ethanol and use a additive the hardware store sells. If the mower is old you might have to take the air cleaner off and put just a tiny bit of gas in the carburetor to get it primed. Having the mower serviced really is worth the expense if it makes the yard easier to take care of, instead of fighting it, you actually can get it done faster. Now about those grass clippings; we are going to change the way we fertilize so the lawn is green but doesn't grow too much, which in turn means we don't have to bag the clippings but can simply mulch them back into the lawn. The mower has to be set up with a mulching set up which means it won't blow clippings all over the sidewalk and house so we don't have to blow them off later. Now the mower starts easily and we don't have to bag the grass clippings, we are getting a little bit closer to an easier lawn. If all you want is a simple "O.K." lawn this is enough, but if you want a really nice lawn, we'll cover some more ideas.