It’s time for us to get the lawn mowers ready for the coming grass cutting season and you homeowners might want to do the same too. Having a properly maintained lawn mower is the first step to having a beautiful lawn. There are a few things you need to do every year to your lawn mower.
Start by making sure the blades are sharp and in good condition, if there are any large notches, bends, or any cracks you need to replace the blades, a blade that is badly damaged can be dangerous to you and to the mower. A cracked blade could break off and a notched or bent blade is out of balance and cause damaging vibrations to the mower.
Then preform the needed maintenance on the engine including changing the oil, replacing the air and fuel filters, and grease any bearings as well as the crankcase if it has one. This is just as important for a lawn mower as it is for a car, and neglecting doing it can shorten the life of the mower the same as it would your car.
Maintaining a mower properly can help it last for many years and give you an excellent quality cut for your lawn.
Well it’s been a while since I posted anything so I figured I’d just pop in and post a quick update.
After a long and fairly dry winter we are just starting to gear up for spring. We are getting all the lawn mowing equipment ready to go as well as our landscaping equipment.
The snowplows and salters are still on the trucks and they won’t be coming off till early April. You never know if winter has on last blast in store till at least April and while I wouldn’t mind on last snow storm I’m sure everyone else is looking forward to an early spring.
On final fun little note, Google street view just came online for Windsor and I am on it (check it out here). Yes I’m talking on my cell phone but don’t worry it’s before the ban went into effect. I actually saw the Google car a few times I just can’t remember where I was when I saw it other than this time.
Well that’s all for now and I’m going to try to remember to update this more often from now on.
Well the Labour Day long weekend is over and so the unofficial end of summer is here. Football season is starting and before you know it the leaves will be turning colour and falling off the trees, so you know what that means. The first snowfall will be just around the corner so now is the time to start thinking about who will be plowing and salting all that snow.
We are just starting to ramp up our advertising for the snow and ice management season. Our availability this year will be limited, since our quality of service is of prime importance we can only take on a certain number of new clients and still maintain our standards of high quality service .
Also a word of caution, please ask all the contractors you are having quote on the snow and ice management services for your property to provide you with proof of liability insurance. There are far to many people out there that snow plow without any insurance (or even a business license for that matter). If you happen to be unlucky and some one slips and falls on your property you could be on the hook for potentially millions of dollars in damages if your snow removal contractor does not have proper insurance.
It’s been a while since I posted something, our season has been really busy so far. Lots of people are taking advantage of the fact that landscaping services are all eligible for the Canadian Home Renovation Tax Credit.
Anyway here is another job we did, as you can see from this before picture the existing landscaping was very overgrown and out of control. I gave the homeowner a rendering of a much more cleaned up and simplified landscape which you can see here. We came in and removed all the old mulch and pea stone, we also removed quite a lot of the plant material, what trees and shrubs we did leave we trimmed up quite a bit to make them look more clean. We installed new cedar mulch in the top part of the bed then redid the wall dividing the top part of the bed from the bottom, in the bottom part of the bed we installed black granite stone fill. In addition we also put some new plant material including Wintergreen, Japanese Barberry, and Blue Star Juniper.
You can see the final result by clicking here.
Well the season has been really busy so far so I haven’t had a lot of time to post new entries however it’s getting to the time of year when the usual Windsor drought season will start to become an issue so I figured I should post some tips on watering.
When it comes to lawn watering to much can be just as bad as not enough. A mistake some people make is watering too frequently and not deeply enough. Most of the common varieties grass that grow around here need 2 inches of water per week. This should be delivered in three separate waterings, Monday Wednesday and Friday for instance. Watering for 20 minutes per area each time you water will usually add up to 2 inches. To find out if your getting enough water take an empty plastic container (like a Sour Cream container) and put it out while you water, measure what’s in the container with a ruler and multiply by three.
The reason to water infrequently but deeply is to promote deeper root growth of the plants, this allows them to better resist stress. Also keeping the thatch layer consistently damp can result in an outbreak of disease so watering less frequently allows the thatch layer to dry out preventing disease.
It’s been a busy year so far with a lot of clean-up work, sod laying and other small stuff. I have done a couple of landscaping jobs in Windsor and so I added some more pictures to the portfolio page, go ahead and check them out.
I have just finished up a rather large landscaping job in south Windsor and I managed to remember to take pictures of the before and after states of the property.
The first picture shows what the job looked like at the very beginning before we started doing any work.
The second picture is the digital rendering I did when i gave the home owner the quote for the job.
The third picture is the finished product.
We installed a mulch bed around the perimeter with pea stone and a flagstone patio in the center. The homeowner wanted something done a little differently with the flagstone patio than normal, they wanted some ground cover type plants to grow in the cracks, so we put black earth in the cracks between the stones instead of sand then we placed creeping thyme seeds into the soil this will create the nice green fill they wanted and provide a pleasant scent when people walk on it. The portfolio page has some more pictures of this job and shows the finished landscaping from several angles.
Well the grass cutting season is getting into full swing so I figured I should offer up a couple of professional tips on how to properly care for a lawn.
The first and most important tip has to do with mowing height. The ideal height for mowing most lawns is between 3-4 inches the reason for this is that most residential and commercial lawns in Windsor are typically composed of a mix of Kentucky Bluegrass, Creeping Fescue, and Perennial Rye Grass. These particular types of grasses need to be fairly long before they can produce leaves, so if the lawn is cut to short the stems will be cut before the area where the leaves emerge, this makes it very hard for the lawn to photosynthesize and grow. this is why Precedence Landscaping keeps all of our mowers set to 3 inches.
The other tip is to make sure that the lawn mower being used to cut the grass has sharp blades, if the blades are not sharp they will tear the grass instead of cutting it cleanly. This can be seen a couple of days after the lawn has been cut as a fraying at the ends of the leaf blades. For the best results the blades of a typical homeowners lawn mower should be sharpened three times a year; once before the first mowing, again on Canada Day, and one more time on Labour Day. As for Precedence Landscaping, with our lawn mowers being used as much as they are, we sharpen the blades at least once a month as sometimes more in the spring and fall peak growing seasons in Windsor.
That’s all for now, as the season continues I’ll offer up some more tips.
I was dropping a friend off at the Windsor airport and standing there outside the terminal was Mike Holmes (of Holmes on Homes). He was in town for the Windsor Home & Garden Show.
I only got to talk to him for a second or two because he was catching a flight, actually I was a bit starstruck so I really didn’t know what to say anyway, and he was still a really down to earth guy. I really like and follow his philosophy of doing things right from the ground up. It’s very frustrating for me seeing things that I know are done wrong and with some of the things I’ve seen so wrong that it’s actually dangerous.
I’ve seen so much crappy work, some of it landscaping related and some of it having to do with other aspects of construction, and I just don’t understand how contractors can do that to other people. I don’t know if it’s just lack of knowledge or if they actually go in intending to rip people off. For example, I’ve seen foundations on brand new homes that have dozens and dozens of cracks, there’s no excuse for that, my house is almost a hundred years old and there are only two small cracks on the whole foundation. That’s just an example of what I’ve seen I could go on typing for a weeks about all the wrong, dumb, backwards, and dangerous things I’ve seen.
Well I’ll get off my soapbox now, I just thought it was cool meeting Mike Holmes. I wish I could have talked with him longer, without being so tongue tied due to being starstruck, and what I really wish is that I could get to work with him.
We just finished our first patio install of the year, it was only 5′ X 8′ however it still has to be done properly in order to last.
That means digging down between 10″-12″ then tamping the base with a power tamper, after that you have to fill in with screenings to between 8″-10″ then wet and tamp the screenings with a power tamper. The screenings will compact about an inch then you add sand up to an inch or so, this part requires some adjustment in the field because it depends on the thickness of the patio stones you are using, you want to make sure that after you install the patio stones they will be level with the existing surface. Lightly tamp the sand with a hand tamper then put down the stones in. If you are using interlocking pavers you would run a tamper over them after putting some lose sand on top, however with cement patio stones you can’t tamp them as they would shatter into a million pieces so you just have to stomp them down.
After you sweep some loose sand into the cracks, voila, you have yourself a new patio that will last for years.
Lawn Care | admin | 
March 30, 2010 12:22 am | 
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