When the leaves start to fall and the flowers stop blooming, many customers think the landscape work is done, but there are a few jobs still to be done before winter arrives.
Moore Landscapes does commercial work in and around Chicago, Illinois, along with some contracts with the city. With lots of trees in the area, fall cleanup is an important part of maintenance programs. “It’s kind of a last thing we do to wrap up our maintenance before the snow flies,” says Paul Sheets, account executive.
Some accounts prefer one big fall cleanup at the end of the season, while others prefer Moore Landscapes to take care of leaves as they fall.
Sheets says it’s based on clients’ budgets, the number of trees on a customer’s property and how the wind blows the leaves around.
Moore Landscapes’ general plan of attack is to use blowers to move the leaves onto tarps, but for larger properties such as town homes, they’ll bring in a truck with a vacuum to move things along faster. Or, for accounts that they visit early in the morning, they’ll switch from gas to electric powered blowers to keep noise to a minimum.
Beside the aesthetic benefits of leaf cleanup, there are health benefits for the lawn. If left on the grass, it suffocates the turf and supports disease. And on some of the larger properties, crews will mulch the leaves and work them into the shrub beds. “The leaves are very beneficial to build up the soil and work into the soil,” Sheets says. “When they’re just lying on the grass they’re not very beneficial.”
While leaf cleanup is included in general maintenance, there are other extras account representatives sell like core aeration and tree fertilization.
“(Core aeration) is very beneficial to the grass at the end of the season in the fall and then we also cut back perennials and things like that before we close everything down. There’s also some selective pruning,” Sheets says, adding that crews will leave some perennial grasses for winter interest.
Account managers promote these additional services by telling customers about the benefits of winter tree fertilization since many think that’s a spring service, not a fall one. “We train the account reps as well as the foremen about the benefits of doing those services,” Sheets says. “It’s really the account rep and their relationship with the customer that will promote these services. And they’re usually above and beyond the typical maintenance contracts.”
And then in the spring, when the tree’s initial leaf out is stronger, representatives will point out how much better it looks than it did in previous years. “And usually when they see the long-term benefits of this tree fertilization and core aeration in the fall, they want to do it the following year,” Sheets says.