flower buds on tree branch ready to bloom

How Warm Winter Weather is Harming Your Plants

Warm, 60- to 70-degree February weather in south central PA feels wonderful for those of us longing for spring, but your lawn and landscape don’t share the same sentiments. In fact, drastic changes in temperature can do quite a bit of harm to your lawn, trees and shrubs, and affect their health throughout the entire growing season.

If you’re wondering what kind of harm a little warm weather can do to your outdoor environment, we’ve broken it down for you below.

How a warm winter harms your lawn

Living in a climate characterized by cold winters means we use cool-season grasses in our lawns. Grasses such as Kentucky or rough bluegrass, ryegrass, fine or turf-type fescue all make great sunny area lawn grasses for Pennsylvania. Continue reading

Rock Salt Alternatives: You Won’t Believe What is Destroying Your Walkway

snow shovel in snowWe’ve been blessed (or cursed, depending on your point of view) with snow-filled winters in Pennsylvania in recent years. While fun for some, those winters wreak havoc on our roads and landscapes. If you have concrete or natural stone walkways at your home, you may even have noticed their condition deteriorating.

Here is a key question: How do you fight off the hazardous ice that forms on the steps and sidewalks around your home? If your answer is with rock salt or other deicers containing ammonium nitrate or ammonium sulfate, then you’re contributing to their deterioration!

Fortunately, there are alternatives that can save your sidewalks, steps, and landscape. If you want to be properly motivated first, check out the ways in which rock salt is detrimental to your property: Continue reading

deck with furniture

Winterizing Your Deck, Patio and Other Outdoor Spaces

As the recent burst of cold fall weather has reminded us, winter is just around the corner. With the Thanksgiving holiday over, it’s time to winterize your deck, patio and other outdoor living spaces before the weekends get any colder! Here is a short list of things to do, compiled by our staff, to prepare your landscape and outdoor areas for the colder months ahead.

If you have outdoor furniture, cover it or store it inside a garage or shed.  This can help preserve the appearance of your furniture, and in the case of wooden or stone material, may protect it from serious damage caused by freeze/thaw cycles. If you don’t have a grill cover, invest in one!  We’ve been using the same grill at our office for over 12 years, and it still looks and works great because we cover it every day.

Many of us have power equipment with small engines such as lawn mowers, chainsaws, string trimmers, and leaf blowers that are put away in the shed and forgotten about after the last use. It’s common for the latter three to have two-stroke engines that use a fuel-oil mixture. With those, be sure to top off the tank. The oil in the mix will help stabilize the fuel over the winter months. Continue reading

residential landscape plan

Winter Planning Leads to Early Spring Installation

“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”

Ben Franklin said it best, and we’d like to think he was referring to planning spring projects over the winter months.

We don’t blame you for putting your landscape on the back burner during a busy holiday season, where you certainly want your home looking great for those extra guests who will be stopping by. We encourage you to not forget your landscape, however, as this is your best opportunity to get a jump on next year. Here are just a few reasons one of the best kept secrets to landscaping success is as simple as and preparation.

Don’t wait until after the holidays

Early winter seems to fly by with the flurry of holidays and family gatherings. By the time you recover from the holidays and have everything cleaned up, spring may have already sprung. So now is the perfect time to jump in and start planning your landscaping projects for next season, as everyone else is caught up in the busy season as well. Continue reading

planting of a small evergreen in dirt

5 Steps to Better Fall Lawn Care

It appears cool weather may finally be here to stay after a hot, dry summer and early fall. Along with fall maintenance tasks such as swapping your screens for storm windows, reversing your ceiling fan, and cleaning rain gutters, you should prepare your home’s landscape for what’s coming.

No one wants to start the spring by replacing one of our beloved trees or shrubs that didn’t make it through the harsh winter. Remember a blizzard named Jonas dumping a few feet of snow in South Central PA and Central MD earlier this year?

The good news is there’s plenty you can do to help your landscape survive the fall and winter and thrive in the spring. Simply follow these simple fall lawn care tips to be well on your way to a happy and healthy landscape in 2017 (and beyond)!

  1. Planting. If you’re planning on adding some new trees or shrubs to your yard, now is the perfect time to start planting for next year. Not only will you save some money as local nurseries discount their remaining material to minimize inventory, but your plant will receive the benefits of building root mass in the cool, moist soil without the stress of drought, high temperatures, or sun scorch.

Continue reading

fall plants

Add a Dash of Color to Your Fall Landscape

Whether the local thermometers agree or not, fall is underway here in Pennsylvania. Summer 2016 was another scorcher, and while York, Lancaster and Adams counties aren’t currently in a declared drought, many of our neighboring counties are.

It may not be obvious yet, but the dry weather is wreaking havoc on our landscapes. For example, most trees will begin going dormant early and without much color, as the leaves will simply turn brown and begin to drop. We expect 75 to 80% of the leaves to be off trees before Thanksgiving arrives, which is 3 to 4 weeks earlier than recent years.

Despite the lack of rain, we can still count on colorful fall shrubs and perennials. Here’s a list of some of our favorites to add around your home. We’ve broken them down by size for easy reference. Continue reading

a backyard area with pool and outdoor lighting

Improve Ambiance, Comfort & Safety with Simple Landscape Lighting

One of the often forgotten and generally underused secrets of a beautiful landscape is landscape lighting. Used properly, landscape lighting brings out a property’s beauty in a way that’s much different from the way in which natural lighting highlights that same beauty.

Because landscape lighting doesn’t reveal everything, your eye goes just to the parts of your landscape that you and your lighting expert choose to highlight. With 50 years of experience in beautifying landscapes, the team at Hively qualifies as experts, and our landscape design team has perfected the use of landscape lighting to bring out the beauty of your property after the sun goes down. Continue reading

lush green grass

Ensure Landscape Success with Simple Soil Testing

Summer is in full swing, and our recent travels around York, PA have revealed that this summer’s heat and lack of rain has taken a toll on local lawns and landscapes.

Many landscape owners believe that the problem is simply the inevitable result of this year’s extreme heat and irregular rain, but something else may be having an effect, and even with ideal temperatures and rainfall, that factor can prevent lawns and landscapes from being fully healthy and looking great.

Fortunately for these home and business owners, the team at Hively Landscapes has the ability to transform their lawns and landscapes from an eyesore into the lush green lawns and beautiful gardens you thought were only possible in commercials. Continue reading

Natural Pest Control

mosquito In celebration of Shark Week 2016 kicking off this Sunday (June 26), we wanted to draw attention to a real danger to humans here in Pennsylvania… mosquitoes! You may be surprised to learn that the deadliest animal in the world is also one of the smallest in size. Here in Pennsylvania, we most associate mosquitoes with the West Nile Virus, and in other parts of the world they also carry malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, encephalitis, and the much talked about, Zika virus. Mosquitoes are hard to escape as they are found in every region of the world except for Antarctica, and in Alaska they’re so big and plentiful that they’re the unofficial state bird. Continue reading

Professionally done landscape by Hively Landscapes

3 Options for Proactive Landscape Maintenance

If you’re familiar with our blog you’ve likely read our previous article on the benefits of proactive lawn care maintenance. From maximizing your flowers and growth to early identification and treatment of problems, residents and businesses alike have found that by selecting a proactive landscape maintenance plan with Hively Landscapes they’re maximizing their landscape investment, while avoiding costly replacements, removals, and other landscape troubles.

We offer three forms of proactive maintenance, and have outlined each below. Continue reading