Spring Cleanups: Tips to Revitalize Your Yard

There’s nothing more stress-relieving than a spring cleanup. It’s time to open your windows, let the sunlight in, and spend lazy afternoons sitting on your porch and appreciating your yard. However, you won’t be able to do that without cleaning it up first. Let’s get into the benefits of a spring cleanup, how to assess and fix winter damage, and a step-by-step spring cleaning guide to put your best lawn forward.

Benefits of a Thorough Spring Cleanup

A spring cleanup is a great excuse for a thorough lawn maintenance session. When done right, it can improve soil health, prevent pests, and promote plant growth during the growing season.

Improve Soil Health

If your local climate gets snow, your soil is used to being dormant for the winter season. However, cleaning up your yard for improved soil health is necessary. Spring cleanups ensure that your yard gets the sunlight it needs and that adequate air circulation is reinstated. This helps your plants perform photosynthesis, mitigates the risk of fungal diseases, and prohibits pests from making a home in your yard.

Prevent Pests

As previously mentioned, spring cleanups remove breeding grounds and hiding spots for pests. Remember that pests are not limited to your grass; it’s important to trim shrubs and trees, cut back perennials, and remove debris from your lawn.

Promote Plant Growth

Spring cleanups don’t just improve soil growth; they also promote plant growth. Of course, the healthier soil does help with this, but other spring cleanup aspects also nurture growth. Pruning damaged branches fosters new tree and shrub growth, fertilizing fosters more vibrant grass growth, and edging flower beds ensures your mulch will stay in its place and contribute to flower growth–and that’s just the beginning.

Using a Spring Cleanup to Assess Winter Damage

Spring cleanups are also a great opportunity to assess winter damage. Broken branches, compacted soil, and dead plants are great things to look for, but you also want to check other things, such as broken irrigation lines, weed growth, and hardscaping damage.

The best first step is to inspect your yard and make a list of what you need to clean or replace. Regarding tasks, it’s best to begin by removing all debris. Not only will this clear a path to work on more difficult aspects of the cleanup, but it will also provide some mulching or composting material.

After that, it’s usually easiest and most productive to work on the easier, shorter tasks first and work your way up to the difficult ones. This usually means taking care of landscaping needs like pruning first, then advancing to lawn care like mulching, aeration, overseeding, and fertilization, before finally making a dent in any hardscape or irrigation damage.

However, it is important to note that certain hardscaping and irrigation problems will require digging, in which case you may want to wait to do certain lawn care activities until after any digging is complete.

Step By Step Spring Cleanup Guide

If you’re a visual learner, you may benefit from a checklist or step-by-step guide. Here’s what a thorough spring cleanup checklist looks like.

1. Clearing Debris: Remove leaves, twigs, and other debris that have accumulated over winter. Most of this will be done with raking. Also, consider composting these materials (assuming they are not diseased or pest-infested) so it’s easier and more affordable to dispose of them, and you can save money on lawn care.
2. Pruning and Trimming: Focus on pruning deciduous trees and shrubs before they bud and sap run. Remove dead, diseased, or damaged branches and thin out overcrowded branches. While you want to improve the plant’s shape, avoid flesh cuts, and stay just outside the branch collar–the main point of pruning is to encourage new growth. You also want to cut back perennials to encourage new growth and give the new buds more access to nutrients.
3. Soil Preparation: You need to prepare your soil for growth and future maintenance. Spring cleanups are the perfect time to weed, till, apply manure, and sample your soil to see what nutrients it lacks, if any. This is also a good time to plant cover crops if necessary. These services will help prepare your lawn for lawn care.
4. Lawn Care: Your lawn has been dormant for some time, so it will need maintenance to bring it back to life. Spring cleanups are a good time for dethatching, aeration, overseeding, sod installation, and fertilization (typically in that order). You will likely not have to mow for a couple of weeks, but once the grass establishes some new growth, you will want to do so weekly.
5. Mulching: Mulching is such a beneficial strategy that it can be done at almost any step in this process. It’s a sustainable best practice to use the debris you cleared from your yard earlier to make your own mulch. Then, you want to evenly apply the mulch to whichever plants need it in a cover between 2 and 3 inches deep and then water the area.
6. Irrigation: After clearing your lawn, it’s good practice to check your irrigation to ensure it’s functioning properly. Run a manual test for each watering zone to ensure sprinkler heads are working properly and nothing leaks. You want to monitor your irrigation throughout the watering season to ensure it stays intact. Still, if there are no problems at the outset, you can schedule it for automated watering.
7. Hardscaping: Hardscaping damage, such as collapsed retaining walls or broken paver patios, is easy to see but not always easy to fix. The solutions become much clearer when the rest of your yard is taken care of, though. Once your space is clear and clean, you can easily DIY your repairs or call a professional.