Category: Information
Benefits of a Lawn Care Program
February 2, 2018It won’t be much longer until the Hively Landscapes team is out in full force in order to ensure our clients’ lawns are the greenest on the block. Can you believe winter’s on its way out already? Yay!
If you’ve recently considered a lawn care treatment program for your home or business, but haven’t yet committed, let us help make your decision a little easier by reviewing a few of the benefits our customers receive from their treatment programs.
January & February Landscaping Tips
December 14, 2017Happy New Year! With 2018 just around the corner, it’s time to start preparing your landscape to look its best in the spring. While it is easy to hide away from the cold winter weather here in Pennsylvania, be sure to spend some time in January and February knocking out some simple yard work- beyond taking down the decorations you put up for the holiday season.
Not sure where to start? Here are a few helpful suggestions:
January
Believe it or not, January usually has a few nice, sunny days that provide the perfect opportunity to work on your landscape. It is the ideal time to inspect flowering trees and shrubs for broken, diseased, or weak branches and carefully prune them out. It is also the ideal time to prune flowering trees for shape but be careful, pruning is a skill that takes years to learn! You can also trim your fruit-bearing plants to encourage new growth and fruit production.
Spring Garden and Landscape Preparation
March 15, 2017In order to keep your landscape looking its best year-round, now is the time to put your springtime prep work in. The experts at Hively Landscapes came up with the following list to help you focus your efforts and save time during your spring garden and landscape preparation, so you can spend more of it enjoying the fruits of your labor.
Apply Fertilizers & Pre-Emergents
A warm winter like the one we’ve had in south central PA presents a myriad of threats to your lawn and landscape. In warm climates (or during abnormally warm winters), weeds can germinate as early as February, and can quickly invade a landscape. The best way to combat them is to apply a pre-emergent herbicide in January or February, and then follow up with a post-emergent treatment as spring arrives.
Also, applying a slow-release fertilizer will provide the right amount of nutrients to your soil, allowing your lawn to thrive and push out weeds, as well as promote top growth.
How Warm Winter Weather is Harming Your Plants
February 27, 2017Warm, 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.
Rock Salt Alternatives: You Won’t Believe What is Destroying Your Walkway
February 1, 2017
We’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:
Winterizing Your Deck, Patio and Other Outdoor Spaces
December 12, 2016As 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.
Winter Planning Leads to Early Spring Installation
November 16, 2016“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.
5 Steps to Better Fall Lawn Care
October 24, 2016It 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)!
- 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.
Add a Dash of Color to Your Fall Landscape
September 27, 2016Whether 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.
Improve Ambiance, Comfort & Safety with Simple Landscape Lighting
August 24, 2016One 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.