Garden Maintenance
Weeding, trimming, cleanup, deadheading, mulching, edging, splitting, planting, etc
At a base rate of 60$ an hour I can take care of all of your garden needs! However I do not use any pesticides, herbicides or synthetic fertilizers.
While maintaining your landscape Ill also promote the local biodiversity adding and leaving plants that I know will add color and life to your garden.
Ill also be bringing in plants, Ive split from other properties I manage to fill in gaps. Some of my gardens contain over 50 species of plants with blooms from spring to fall! The typical landscape usually has around 10 with most blooms in early summer.
Maintaining your landscape through the years. Maintaining the landscape and gardens after installation is extremely important to the process of guiding it to peak form. No two years are the same in the gardens I create. With constant additions via transplanting, starting seed and filling in gaps, your garden will grow and flourish even more year after year! Below is the same garden I've been maintaining for 4 years. Notice how the garden evolves and fills in over that time.
July 2020, fresh after the spring install, note the open space and how the plants are small. A theme in my gardens is that many plants initially planted don't end up making the cut. This is normal as I learn about the conditions of your garden from the soil to the microclimate to herbivory by deer and rabbits. I share all of this info freely with my costumers, as most of this any homeowner can do. During this first phase is was a lot of weeding. This is the most important phase and doesn't allow weeds to overtake the new plantings.
July 2021, one growing season in, a lot of plants have nearly doubled in size, as well as many more plants added by the homeowner, brought in from other gardens I maintain and spread by seed. This year I mulched again, a mistake that cost me a few plants and prevented some of the seed produced by the garden to not germinate. I am still dealing with this excess mulch to this day.
This year there was much less weeding. Most weeds are annuals and need to reseed to continue existing in the garden. My goal is to prevent that from happening.
Other weeds such as mug wort, a highly aggressive and invasive perennial, takes a few years to establish a colony. This plant is typically the bane of most new installs if left unmaintained and it also paves the way for shrubby vines like bittersweet to take over.
August 2022, unfortunately I missed the peak bloom for this garden which is in July, notice the size and the density of plants has vastly increased. Many plants I have also allowed to come up from seed. My gardens are an ever changing mosaic of plants and that year the garden really came into its own. Plants like Echinacea, Rose campion and Scarlet Yarrow did really well. This year was also marked by an extreme drought. Most plants I pick for the gardens are drought tolerant so many made it and even thrived in the adverse conditions.
As the garden fills in there is less space for weeds and unwanted plants to grow. At this point maintenance is reduced 50-75% as compared to the first year. At this stage and after the garden is more or less self sufficient. Needing only spot weeding, splitting, thinning and deadheading.
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July 2023, this garden keeps getting better and better! As you have seen from the recent photos, I keep a photographic diary of your garden for future reference when adding plants and moving things around. This is especially helpful during fall spring bulb planting when I need to know where they came up last year so I don't accidently damage or dig them up. Compare 2020 to this, the change is drastic and I hope to create a garden similar to this for you!
This year Im doing the important task of splitting and thinning the garden out, this may seem counter intuitive but splitting allows more space for different plants as well as being a supply of plants for new clients of mine. Once a garden reaches this stage maintenance can potentially become free as I sell the splits to new clients.
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