SERVICES

Maintenance

Mikes' Landscape and Design provides extensive lawn care and maintenance services.

Lawn Analysis

Determine your lawn's overall health.
List the different grasses and soil types in your lawn and their condition.
IdentifyIdentify weeds, insects and/or diseases that appear to be affecting lawn and recommend ways to control them.
Advise you of proper mowing and watering techniques.
Evaluate the potential of your lawn, and make recommendations to help your lawn be the greenest, thickest and healthiest it can be.

Mowing
Good mowing practices are critical to the appearance of your lawn. If you follow these general guidelines you can increase the health and appearance of your lawn. Make sure your blade is sharp. A lawn mowed with a dull blade appears gray shortly after mowing and the tips turn brown within 48 hours. Cut often enough to remove no more than 1/3 of the grass blade. This will help avoid scalping, which puts the grass under stress and reduces its vigor. Mowing at the correct height also helps to shade the soil, keeping temperatures lower for optimum growth. You may leave clippings if you mow often enough. The grass clippings will recycle nutrients back into the soil and do not contribute to thatch build up.

Pruning
Pruning landscape plantings is a useful way to control growth and repair damage. Minor pruning can be done at any time of the year; major pruning projects should be done in the early Spring before new growth begins. Flowering bushes should be pruned shortly after blooms fall. Plants injured by storms, accidents or vandalism should be pruned to remove damaged areas as soon as possible. Pruning should be done on dry days, when limbs and twigs are dry. After trimming diseased plants, tools should be disinfected to prevent transferring the infection to healthy plants.

Mulching
Using mulch around the base of plants has many benefits including retention of soil moisture and prevention of heat loss. However, when applying mulch, one should be careful not to use too much, checking to see that it is not smothering the base of plantings and is not more than 4 inches high in the beds. The key symptoms that indicate over-mulching are off-color foliage, small leaves, poor twig growth and tieback of older branches. Over-mulching can cause many problems if not corrected in a timely manner, including; root oxygen starvation, inner bark death, disease & insect promotion, and chewing rodent harborage.

Fertilization
Fertilizer promotes root development and increased turf density. Throughout the year, applications of fertilizer perform assorted duties for your lawn.