You might be asking what fine garden maintenance services are. Over the years, I’ve heard way too many people say that they renovated their gardens a certain amount of years ago and obviously the company we hired didn’t know what they were doing because our yard is a jungle. That might be true. There are a lot of landscape companies that don’t fully understand sustainable landscape design, they don’t fully understand plants and how they mature or what they truly need to remain healthy. They might also use unhealthy horticultural practices because they don’t know any better. Just because you have the ability to dig holes and install plants or you can identify a Viburnum from a Boxwood, it doesn’t mean someone is good at creating a landscape that lasts. There is a lot to consider. That said, I’ve also seen plenty of well thought out landscape installations over the years that were not managed properly or not managed at all. Even at Designing Eden llc, I’m always amazed when someone passes on our garden maintenance services after spending 6 figures for us to design and install a new landscape. In my eyes, that’s similar to buying a new car and never changing the oil or replacing the air filter. It just doesn’t make sense and if I knew their thinking ahead of time, I would have passed on the project. In fact, as I look back over my career as a landscape designer and a landscaper, I can say that the only gardens we’ve designed over my 40 plus year career that have failed are the ones we weren’t involved in maintaining.
The reality is, gardens are always moving forwards or they are moving backwards no matter who the designer was or how well thought out the garden was. Believe me when I say, it’s more important to maintain a garden properly than it is to hire the best landscape designer or the best company to install a new garden. If you don’t maintain your garden or landscape, the garden/landscape will fail 100% of the time.
Fine garden maintenance services is a garden service that regularly and systematically manages not only plants but the spaces between plants. The goal of fine garden maintenance services is to, at the very least, prevent a garden from moving backwards. Proper pruning at the correct time of the season is important. Lawn maintenance companies, who are expected to maintain garden beds, typically do this during slowdowns in turf growth, mainly in the heat and drought of July and August. This doesn’t work well for a lot of plants and it’s often why some people never see flowers on plants that are supposed to flower. If a season’s worth of garden maintenance is left for a couple of days in July or August, most spring flowering plants won’t flower because next year’s flower buds are being removed in late summer. Fine garden maintenance involves deadheading annuals and perennials at least once a month. If there are annuals, either in the ground or in containers, those visits should happen much more frequently. Deadheading encourages plants to create more and continuous flowers. At Designing Eden llc, we sometimes make recommendations to our maintenance clients to either make their gardens better or we offer suggestions on ways we might be able to reduce maintenance by making changes to the existing landscape. The one thing we always try to do is reduce the amount of mulch we use each year. I look for ways to spend a little money now to save more money later. This might include transplanting or pulling some perfectly healthy plants because they take too much time to maintain them where they are in the garden. Another thing I’m looking to do is to reduce deer spraying. We have gardens we maintain that need regular deer spraying. When I design new landscapes, I try to stay away from deer food but some of our garden maintenance clients have gardens we didn’t design or install. In those instances, I like to slowly swap out plants the deer love, for plants they’re not fans of. Of course, it’s hard to have a fall garden without deer food since deer will nibble on Anenome, Sedum and Asters. Even our gardens include this deer food so every garden typically needs some deer spraying but we’re always trying to minimize spraying as much as possible and by all means, lets avoid the Hosta! Unfortunately, gardens and landscapes in Litchfield County are constantly under pressure from deer but the goal is to minimize the time and expense of spraying as much as possible.
We’ve been offering a fine garden maintenance services for decades. We have gardens that we designed and installed in the 90’s that we still maintain today. If you’re looking to keep your garden in tip top shape or if your garden has gotten a little unruly and you’re trying to bring it back to peak form, it might be a time to give us .call
