As spring weather approaches, it’s time for lawn care professionals and property owners to start thinking about beginning of the year yard care. Taking steps to care for the lawn early in the spring makes it far easier to maintain a lush, healthy lawn for the rest of the year.
The look of a lawn has an enormous impact on the curb appeal of a home or commercial property. Whether your customers are homeowners or business owners, you can give them a great spring yard by offering lawn care services tailored to the specific things that lawns need at this time of the year.
Consider offering clients a walk-through of their lawns in the spring so you can examine and explain the lawn’s condition. That’ll give you the chance to see if there are any issues to address—like a thatch build-up, soil compaction, or bare spots in the yard—and make clients aware of the issues so they can make informed decisions about their lawn care.
Get Ready for Spring Advertising
In order to give customers a fantastic spring lawn, you first have to connect with them. Before the spring rush is a great time to spend some time working on our 5 Essential Tips To Get Your Lawn Care Business Ready For Spring.
Winter and early spring are the perfect time to update your website, optimize social media pages, advertise spring services, update advertisements and offers, and catch up on equipment maintenance. When you take some extra time to make your online presence easy to navigate and you reach out to connect with existing and new customers, that’ll help set your company up for success this spring.
Offer Clean Up Services
Cleanup is usually one of the first spring tasks that needs to be done in most yards. Dead leaves from last year can smother spring grass or encourage fungus and mold if they don’t get cleaned up. Weeds and dead plants also need to be cleared out of the gardens before planting new flowers.
Some homeowners might want to clean up yards themselves, but others will welcome help with raking the lawn and prepping for spring. Early yard cleaning will give the grass and gardens a head-start on looking fantastic as the weather warms up.
Stop Weeds Before They Grow
Preventing and removing weeds is often near the top of homeowner’s concerns for their lawn, especially if the local homeowner’s association regulates the look of a lawn. To help stop weeds, pre-emergents fertilizers can be applied around March 15, or before the soil temperatures are consistently over 55 degrees Fahrenheit.
As you’re planning your options for weed prevention this year, keep in mind that offering organic and environmentally friendly options is one way your company can fill customers’ needs. More and more people are concerned about the potential danger of putting chemical herbicides, pesticides, and fertilizers on their lawns. If you can offer “green” options for taking care of lawn and garden weeds, there’s a good chance new and existing customers will appreciate it.
Aerate Lawns
Aeration is one task that makes a huge difference in the health of a lawn. For Texas lawns, it’s a good idea to aerate between March 15th and May 1st every year. Aerating
with a core aerator decreases soil compaction and helps create a healthy environment for grass roots by letting water and nutrients get deeper into the soil.
Most homeowners won’t invest in an aerator since it’s a fairly expensive piece of lawn equipment and they’d only use it once a year. You can help give customers a great spring lawn by explaining the benefits of yearly aeration and offering it as one of your lawn care services.
Fertilize at the Right Time
The best time for applying the first spring fertilizer is a few days after core aeration. Fertilizing the lawn after aerating lets more nutrients get down into the soil instead of being washed off by rain or irrigation.
Fertilizing at the right time in the spring will help provide a beautiful lawn for your customers. You can also take the guesswork out of fertilizing for customers by keeping track of when to fertilize throughout the growing season. As with weed control, it’s often a good idea to offer natural and organic fertilizer options for customers who’d rather not use chemicals on the lawn.
Replant and Repair Lawns
If your company offers lawn repair services, spring is a great time to market them. Clients’ lawns might have been damaged overwinter, or by heavy traffic the year before, or by some kind of lawn disease. Reseeding areas that are thin or bare not only keeps the yard looking nice, but also helps maintain a thick healthy lawn that discourages weed growth.
Reseeding and replanting damaged warm-season lawns in the spring lets new grass spend the entire growing season establishing roots before the weather turns cold. Just remember not to apply pre-emergent herbicides if you are going to reseed any bare spots in the lawn since they’ll stop the grass seed from sprouting as well as the weeds.
Provide Regular, Reliable Mowing
As a lawn care professional, you know that regular mowing at the right time and the right height is important to maintain healthy grass. And because mowing needs to be done so often and on a regular schedule, busy property owners are often happy to hire professionals to take care of cutting the lawn.
Spring mowing should start as soon as the grass begins growing so the lawn doesn’t become overgrown. If previous clients haven’t yet renewed their contracts, early spring is a great time to remind them to do so. At the same time, you might also work on recruiting new clients who’d appreciate you taking the work out of maintaining a great looking spring lawn for their home or business.
Use Quality Tools
You need reliable tools if you’re going to give your customers a great spring lawn. These tools need to be able to handle working just as hard as you do, day in and day out. Without top-quality tools, the task of maintaining customer yards is a whole lot more challenging than it needs to be.
Here at Richardson Saw & Lawnmower, we carry a wide range of equipment from respected professional brands including Stihl, Scag, Echo, and Toro. From purchase to maintenance to repair, we’ve got you covered for all your commercial equipment needs. Want to learn more? Click here to get in touch with us, or stop by our location in Richardson.
