Planting Fall Mums

If you’ve walked through the stores lately, you’ve likely seen some Halloween decorations out already! Fall is fast approaching and so is the season for beautiful mums. Mums are excellent, hardy flowers that will bring color to places where your summer floral is no longer thriving. Here are some helpful tips when planting mums in the fall:

• Start buying your mums at the end of August.
• Find out your hardiness zone and purchase mums that coincide with your zone. You can buy hardy or tender ones.
• Find an area that gets a few hours (at least 6 or 7) of sunlight.
• Prep the area you are planting the mums with compost or a good planting soil.
• When planting the mums from the pot you purchased, loosen the roots. If you find that they are too tough, you can cut them.
• Water your mums enough so that the soil is moist; make sure not to overwater them.
• Sit back and enjoy the beauty of your mums!

If you want them to come back the next year even more beautiful, make sure to place mulch on the area where they are planted during the winter. This will protect the roots from frost. Once Spring arrives, prune and fertilize them. Before you know it, you will see even larger blooms and stems that will add even more beauty to your garden.

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Reclaim Your Lawn with Lawn Care Tips

If you are baffled by what to do to make your lawn look like a golf course, you may need some help from the experts. You probably have seen Scott’s lawn care products and heard of their lawn service, but you may not know exactly what to buy when and how to apply it to your lawn. Don’t worry, you aren’t alone and I used to be in your shoes, until I figured this out. Feel free to use my

Call Scott’s lawn service and have them come out and do an analysis of your lawn. They will tell you what type of grass or grasses you have, which will help you when it comes to figuring out what lawn care products you should purchase. They will also tell you what they will do to repair your yard and then maintain it. Of course, they will also give you a quote for this work. Be aware that the price may shock you, and you may be left thinking, “There must be a cheaper way!”

You are right, there is. You have two options. You can either have the lawn service come out and get your lawn going again. They can kill your weeds and start the turn around. Once they do this and you see improvement in your lawn, all you have to do is maintain it by following the Scott’s program that they have laid out for you (what they were going to do).

The other option is to turn your lawn around yourself by taking the suggestions that lawn analysis gave you. It will take a lot of work and time, but you will save some money. All you have to pay for is the lawn care products such as the weed killer, fertilizer, grass seed etc.

The key is to keep up on your lawn just as the lawn service would do for you. If you don’t have the time or initiative to keep up on it, you might want to consider budgeting some money to have the service.

(Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/orangeacid/458563200/)

Solve Your Flowerbed Weed Problems

Are you sick of getting on your hands and knees every  summer plucking out weeds? Do you wish you didn’t ever have to pull another one again? You can solve this weed problem with some preliminary work along with your lawn care next year.

Start by spraying weed killer on your flowerbeds. Be sure to use one that doesn’t kill flowers in case you want to plant some in your flower beds. Once the weeds are brown and dead (about a week), you can rake them up.

Your next investment should be weed matting. You can find it at your local gardening center. Before you head out though, measure the area you need to cover so you purchase the right amount. When you get it, lay it down, cut it to cover and place the stakes in to keep it in place.

The black weed matting isn’t attractive so you’ll want to put down some mulch, pine straw, rocks, or whatever you like to decorate your flowerbeds with. To place flowers in your nicely covered flowerbeds now, simply grab some scissors and make incisions where you want them. Be careful not to make the hole too large or weeds will start growing in that area. If you have some matting left over, you can always cover areas you’ve cut too much of to prevent that from happening.

Lastly, stand back and pat yourself on the back for doing such hard work that will save you so much time in the future. Your flowerbed weed problems are gone!

(Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/danielfarrell/129009953/)

Beating Dry Grass in the Heat

Are you sick of working so hard on your lawn care, only for it to start to dry up as soon as the sun rises in the morning? Water restrictions are common in hot climate areas, so they work against you when you try to keep your lawn alive during the heat. To cut down on the amount of water you need for your lawn, you might want to consider how you are cutting it.

You should be cutting your grass so that it’s at least three inches tall. Now, if you love to work in your yard, this won’t sound too bad for you. If you don’t enjoy mowing the lawn, you may think, No way! I’ll be cutting it every two days.

Before you turn your head to this tip, understand the concept of cutting your grass to three inches. Let’s start with an analogy:

If you are cleaning something and have wet rags, what happens if you lay the rags out side by side? They dry quickly, right? Well, what if you piled them all up on top of each other? The ones on top would dry while the bottom would stay wet, right?

The same goes for your grass. If you keep it longer, the roots will remain moist longer because it’s shaded by the longer blades so the drying sun can’t zap the moisture from them. That means you can water your grass less often and for less time!

(Photo Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/wili/614590890/)