Halfway through April, with Easter and Passover behind us, winter a memory, and Summer just a glimmer in our collective mind’s eye, chances are the next item on your agenda is Spring cleaning. It’s that staple of finishing up the previous season and preparing for the next so your home in the summer can feel as light as a beach read. Tasks include putting away winter items and otherwise decluttering, but what about Spring Cleanup, the outdoor equivalent of its more prominent indoor cousin? If you’ve not heard of this outdoor Spring ritual, there’s no need to worry because your Ankeny landscape is Master Grass’s domain! Here are some of the ways we get your yard ready for the Spring while cleaning up the remnants of the winter. But first, let’s start with why. Why Does Spring Cleanup Matter? Yard cleanup is an essential element of landscaping. It has aesthetic and health benefits for your yard, but beyond that regular cleanup that we may do during maintenance or before a mow, there is the more in-depth seasonal cleanup we do when one season ends and another begins. Like indoor Spring cleaning, it’s a ritual of preparing for the new, and also similarly, one of the most important transitions is in the Spring. The Look of Clean We’ll start with the obvious: A messy yard looks bad! But, fairly or not, people make assumptions about their friends and neighbors based on their homes and yard’s appearance. So if your yard is full of dead plants, twigs, leaves, and a general mess, people will get the impression you don’t care about your property. Not only can that make a wrong impression, but unfortunately, when contractors think you don’t care about your property, they may think they don’t need to either. Why It Matters for Plant Health Spring cleanup improves the health of your plants in two ways. Firstly, it prevents the spread of disease, and secondly, it removes obstacles to growth. Sometimes plants get fungal or other diseases. If left unchecked, these can spread to other plants. Removing dead or diseased plants helps to prevent the spread of poor health to your other plants. Secondly, anything resting on top of your grass or other plants is blocking it from sunlight, warmth, water, and nutrients. It also can trap water beneath it, which may lead to mold. Cleaning up prevents this. Makes Room for New Life The last way cleanup helps your landscape is by making room for new beauty. Even the most expansive of yards has a limited amount of space. You don’t want to waste any of it with dead plants. When you remove dead plants, you can replace them with whatever suits your current fancy! What Does Spring Cleanup Include? Now that you understand why Spring cleanup matters, let’s talk about how Master Grass cleans up your yard to improve it. Debris Collection The first step in cleaning up is removing all the plant debris. Since plants shed quite a bit naturally, they’ll be at least a few leaves blowing around on any given day. But when you add winter storms and ice and snow weighing down tree branches, you may find Spring will begin with quite a collection of dead plant matter! We’ll start by scouring your lawn and gardens and removing all the dead leaves, sticks, twigs, and anything else that doesn’t belong. Pruning and Dead Plant Removal After removing the obvious dead plant matter, we’ll check on the health of your living plants. We’ll then cut off any part of your flowers and other plants that have died or have begun ailing. That helps their health in two ways. Firstly, removing dead parts allows your plants to focus their limited resources on the healthy parts of themselves and get stronger. That’s how pruning and deadheading stimulate growth. Secondly, if any of your plants are sick or unhealthy because of disease, removing those parts will limit the potential of that disease to spread to the rest of your plant. It also makes attracting predator pests less likely. We’ll also take this opportunity to uproot any whole plants that died over the winter. Spring Forward with Master Grass! As you can see, Spring cleanup is to your yard what Spring cleaning is to your home. Both are all about letting go of what no longer is serving you! So while you handle the inside, call on Master Grass to clean up the outside! We love to help you prepare your yard for Spring, Summer, and beyond!