How to Clean and Prepare Your Yard for Spring

With winter behind us, I, Matthew Davies, am here to remind you that now is the perfect time to rekindle your passion for gardening. After months of heavy blankets of snow and ice, you can give your yard a new lease on life by replanting grass in areas that need it, shrubs, and even yard trees. Follow these helpful hints to get your yard looking beautiful and full of life once more.

Have a Landscape Plan

The beauty of your lawn will quickly increase the value of your home. The best way to get your yard to look the best possible is to go into it with a perfect landscape plan.

If you don’t have any exterior design experience, hiring an expert to assist you before working on your lawn would be highly beneficial. Remember that anything you can imagine, you can quickly achieve.

Clean Up a Little

As I’ve always advised my readers, begin with the basics. Due to the winter killing a fair number of trees and burying the yard in heavy snow for months, there’s a good chance you’ll have a lot of damage outside.

The dullness of the trees and fallen leaves, debris, and twigs collect a lot of dirt. It’s best to start with a cleaning session. For the best experience, I suggest you use rakes, gloves, and blowers.

Here are some of the most important considerations to keep in mind as you clean up your lawn.

• Clean up any trash

• Weed and remove dirt to prepare flower beds

• Use pest and weed control options 

• Prune your shrubs

Prepare the Soil

Applying fertilizer to your grass is the easiest way to prepare your soil for spring planting. At this stage, you should also apply a pre-emergent and weed killer and modify the soil if possible. You can use green manure instead of fertilizer if you don’t have any.

The ideal time to begin soil preparation is at the start of the spring season. It eliminates any dormant weed seeds on your lawn and gives you the ample time to reapply.

This is also a beautiful way to keep crabgrass at bay. Most lawn care companies offer the best pre-emergent and weed killer in a combination bottle for a single application. This is useful for reducing application costs and time.

Mow Early in the Season

Most homeowners’ biggest mistake is to mow late into the spring and mow once a week during the springtime. This is not ideal, especially if you want healthy grass during the late spring and early summer. Mowing early and often is an excellent way to keep the grassroots reproducing both efficiently and correctly. I suggest trimming every five days or so, depending on the weather.

Once you mow, you can build up some of the best relaxation setups for your family and friends too. You can choose from any of these options:

· Wooden playhouses

· Wooden gazebos

· A gardening shed

· A woodshed

These are just a few great ideas that will bring your family closer as they work together. Give them a short lesson on using hot to use a screw gun, safety when building outdoor kits in the backyard, and types of screws and tools typical for working in the backyard.

Mulch It Too

Once your yard has been appropriately cared for, selecting good, heavy mulch would be a wise decision. All you’ll have to do is edge the lawn and trim any dead branches from shrubs that may be lying around. 

This preserves the moisture in the soil and keeps the grass looking healthy and green.

Instead of dyed brown wooden chips, hardwood tree back mulches are a good choice. They usually look fantastic and last longer than the former.

Give Trees a Trim

Unless you take a very close look, you’ll never know if the tree in your yard has dead branches. Dead branches that haven’t been cut will easily fall off, leaving your lawn in poor condition (besides looking unkempt).

The best way to avoid this is to invest in a tree trimmer and prune your trees every three years. Just keep in mind that you should do this in the spring rather than the winter.

Wait Until the Fall to Seed

Your grass seeds will not germinate if you are still reapplying your pre-emergent or weed killer. While the pre-emergent will eliminate weed seeds, it will also eliminate grass seeds. The best course of action is to fertilize the grass and wait a few weeks for the shoots to grow over the brown spots.

Even better, you can cover the patches with sod – chunks of lawn mounds covered in grass. Seeds are not as effective as sod.

 

Additional Tips 

Technically, what we’ve discussed is sufficient if you want your yard to be ready for entertaining guests, easy gardening, playing with your children, and spending time with your family. For the longterm health of your lawn, however, your landscaping plan should also include the following.

 

• Maintain a regular cleaning schedule
• Break up new lawn ground with a tiller 
• Build raised beds 
• Use landscape berms 
• Plant rabbit-proof grass

 

These are some of the essential suggestions you can use once spring arrives. Don’t overthink things. Always keep things easy.

 

Conclusion

Giving your yard a new lease on life after a long winter of snow isn’t always impossible, mainly if you know where to look. The best thing to do is to start planning ahead of time and choose the right plants.

Most suggestions mentioned here are simple DIY projects, and you won’t need to hire a professional to help you. That is why, if you want to regain your aesthetic or gardening touch quickly after the winter, caring for your yard is the best option.

Finally, before you begin, make sure you read a few more posts, tips, and blogs. It will help you gather enough information, borrow new ideas to try out, and maximize your creativity. This is fantastic if you want to have the best yard in the spring.

I, Matthew Davies, wish you the best of luck on your grass and garden this coming year. We all need something to take our minds off COVID, and gardening is as good a thing to do as any!