Backyard Maintenance Tips

As the weather changes, your outdoor environment may require you to shift your care routine. To keep your landscaping healthy and beautiful, we recommend tackling the following tasks to ensure that come spring, your yard looks as great as ever:

Doing a Dirt Test
First, perform a soil test for a foundational understanding of what your pH and nutrient levels are. Without healthy soil, you are setting yourself up for failure as it’s a critical component for a happy lawn and garden. Since soil is made from a combination of minerals, organic matter, air and water, it’s what enables your well-crafted landscaping to thrive and your property to shine.

You’ll want to pick up an easy and inexpensive soil testing kit to check for pH, calcium, lime and potassium. Once you know whether your soil errs on the side of more acidic or more alkaline, you can make adjustments to restore balance.

Most Arizona soil is made of three layers including the surface, subsurface and the subsoil. Knowing the innate components of your soil is a great way to understand how it holds water and nutrients for your plants.

Gather Up the Leaves
Next, to create a free mulch to protect precious plants through colder temperatures, you can rake up available leaves and either shred or grind them (or even go over them with a mower if possible) before distributing them around your plants. You will want to keep about a one to three inch buffer zone around each plant for air.

Lawn Care
Giving your yard a good pre-winter buzz can help reduce the matting, the chance of disease or even rodent damage. It also provides a good time to aerate and reseed stressed lawns at the end of the warm months.

After you do a thorough job preparing your green zones, be sure to give your hardscapes a bit of TLC with a good pressure wash in advance of the cold weather. This may include your driveway, pool decks, outdoor patios and more.