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Now that you have the garden prep underway, it’s time to clean up those flowerbeds and landscaped areas. All of the spring clean-up jobs on the following checklist applies to Northern Virginia homeowners.
Your 7 Tip Spring Clean Up Checklist: Make Your Landscape Colorful Again
Right now, your flowerbeds and landscaped areas may look messy and drab with dry leaves, trash, and stones leftover from snow removal in the winter.
It’s time to clean out your beds, prepare them for adding plants, and spread mulch for a tidy look. Here are the seven tips for a successful spring clean up in garden landscaping:
1. Cleaning debris from landscape beds
Leaves, trash, stones, and other debris need to be gently raked out of landscape beds. Your backyard landscapers will use a lawn rake to gently remove the debris from your beds without disturbing any tender plants popping out of the ground.
Why start by cleaning out your beds? Your landscaped areas need a fresh start. Clearing out leaf litter, stones, seedpods, and pinecones allows the soil to breathe fresh air. Plus, it prepares the beds for weeding, planting annuals, and adding mulch.
2. Edging your beds defines where the lawn ends and the landscaping begins
Edging provides curves and lines. It also adds boundaries between the property and your garden beds. Your landscaper will edge your beds with edging plants, brick, pavers, stone, and other hardscape materials to separate your landscaped area from your lawn or another area.
Your gardening service will edge your beds to create space instead of looking like your landscaped areas are floating off in your yard.
Read more: Get Ready for Spring: How to Pair a Walkway with a Garden
Also, edging keeps grass out of your beds and mulch out of the lawn. Finally, edging provides lines and curves that draw the eye to your landscapes and hardscapes.
3. Spring tree and shrub pruning
The following trees and shrubs need pruning this spring in Northern Virginia:
- Barberry
- Boxwood
- Cherry laurel
- Evergreen euonymus
- Evergreen privet
- Forsythia
- Fothergilla
- Fragrant and winter daphne
- Japanese and sasanqua camellias
- Mugo pine
- Pussy willow
- Quince
- Serviceberry
- Thorny Elaeagnus
- Winter Jasmine
- Witchhazel
Your gardening service will prune these shrubs and trees after they bloom or if blossoms don’t depend on old wood.
Pruning helps your tree and shrubs maintain their natural shape, gets rid of dead or diseased limbs, and helps to control any outgrowth.
4. Spring tree and shrub fertilization
Your landscaper will fertilize your trees and shrubs to help them develop a robust root system, healthy leaves, branches, and flowers.
Fertilizer also helps younger trees and shrubs to grow by stimulating new growth or maintaining the existing growth habit.
5. Laying down Typar, a landscaping fabric
Your backyard landscapers will lay down Typar landscaping fabric to control weed growth. Typar is a lightweight landscaping fabric that allows water and nutrients to penetrate the soil while keeping out weeds.
Your gardening service will put down Typar in your:
- Flowerbeds and gardens
- Planters and pot liners
- Under mulch and rock
- Behind retaining walls.
Read more: Why Should I Build a Seat Wall?
Laying down mulch: Mulch provides more than a tidy look to your front and backyard design. It also helps regulate soil temperature, keeps out weeds, holds in moisture, and protects plant roots from frost-heaving.
Additionally, mulch provides extra nutrition as it breaks down in the soil.
6. Installing spring annuals in your flowerbeds
Next, your landscaper will install spring annuals, such as
- Ageratum
- Bacopa
- Begonias
- Calendulas
- Coleus
- Ganzania
- Geraniums
- Heliotropes
- Impatiens
- Lobelia
- Nasturtiums
- Nicotiana flowering tobacco
- Petunias
- Snapdragons.
Spring annuals give your walkways, beds, and other landscaped areas an explosion of color, brightening your home and welcoming everyone who visits you. You’ll also enjoy sitting and looking at all the colorful blossoms.
Campbell and Ferrara: Gardeners Near You
Put in “landscape designers near me” or “gardeners near me” in a Google search, and you should see Campbell and Ferrara Outdoor Living Services pop up.
We provide garden landscaping services, including all spring clean-up services listed in the checklist above. You can have a tidied landscape that brings you pride and joy in Northern VA.
Book us at Campbell and Ferrara if you’re ready for your VA backyard clean up. Call us today at 703-705-7892 or fill out our contact form.
Campbell and Ferrara provides landscape design/build services and a retail garden center for homeowners living in Alexandria, Annandale, Arlington, Fairfax, Falls Church, Mount Vernon, and Springfield, Virginia.
Sources:
FairfaxGardening.org, Fertilizing Landscape Trees and Shrubs (pdf).
GardeningKnowHow.com, Types of Zone 7 Flowers—Learn About Zone 7 Annuals and Perennials.
PiedmontMasterGardeners.org, When to Prune.
Pubs.Ext.Vt.edu, A Guide to Successful Pruning: Shrub Pruning Calendar (pdf).
TheSpruce.com, 15 Garden Edging Ideas to Make Your Garden Pop.
TyparGeoSynthetics.com, Typar Landscape Fabric.
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