The point of a spring cleanup
Snow sits on a property for months here, and it leaves a mess behind. Matted grass, split branches, gravel thrown into beds by the plow, leaves that blew in after the fall cleanup and never got picked up. A spring cleanup clears all of that before growth starts, so the first mow is a mow and not a salvage operation.
Timing matters more than most people expect. Go too early and you are walking on saturated ground, which compacts the soil and does more damage than the debris was doing. Wait until the ground has firmed up and the grass has started to green at the base.
What is normally included
The work varies by property, but most spring cleanups cover the same ground:
- Clearing leaves, sticks and winter debris from lawns and beds
- Cutting back perennials and ornamental grasses left standing over winter
- Raking out matted turf so air and light reach the crowns
- Re-edging bed lines that frost heave has blurred
- Pulling the first flush of weeds before they seed
- Sweeping back the stone and salt the plow pushed into beds and lawn edges
- A fresh layer of mulch, two to three inches, once the beds are clean
Mulch is worth being careful about. Two to three inches is plenty, and it should not be piled against trunks or stems. Heaped mulch holds damp against bark and invites rot.
What to sort out before the season gets busy
Spring books out fast. From the first warm week the calendar fills, and the properties that get scheduled first are the ones that called before the weather turned.
It is also the right moment to deal with anything winter exposed. Lawn areas the plow scalped, drainage that backed up during the melt, a shrub that split under snow load, a section of edging that lifted. These are cheap to fix in April and awkward to fix in July once everything has grown in around them.
If you want a hand with any of it, call (716) 466-5651 or request an estimate and we will come look at the property.
The dead strip along the driveway
Nearly every property we clean up in April has one: a band of brown grass a foot or two wide running along the drive and the walks. It is almost never winter kill. It is rock salt, thrown wide during the season, and it has pushed enough sodium into that strip to stop anything growing.
It does recover, but not on its own and not quickly. The fix is to flush the strip with water once the ground has thawed to move the salt down past the root zone, then rake it out and overseed. Left alone it stays bare until midsummer, by which point the weeds have found it.
Worth knowing for next winter: the damage comes from salt landing on turf rather than on the hard surface. Keeping it on the pavement, or using a calcium chloride blend which works at much lower rates, avoids most of it. That is part of what ice management is for.
What a cleanup will not fix
A spring cleanup is a clearing job. It makes the property ready for the season. There are things it will expose and not repair, and it is better to know which is which before the crew arrives.
- Compacted or bare lawn areas need aeration and overseeding, and the right time for that is late August into September, not April
- Standing water during the melt is a grading or drainage problem, and no amount of raking changes it
- Plow-damaged edging, lifted pavers and split shrubs are separate repairs, usually small ones if they are dealt with now
- Beds that have lost their shape entirely may want redesigning rather than re-edging
We will point these out and quote them separately rather than folding them into the cleanup, so you can decide what is worth doing this year.
When to book it
Call in February or early March. The work happens later than that, but the calendar fills in the order the phone rings, and from the first warm week everyone in Western New York wants their property done in the same fortnight.
The cleanup itself should happen once the ground is firm underfoot and the grass is greening at the base. In this region that is usually somewhere in the first three weeks of April, though a late lake-effect run can push it back and there is no point forcing it. Walking heavy equipment across saturated clay compacts it for the rest of the season.
Most people book the cleanup and the first cuts together, which is worth doing because it fixes your place in the mowing rotation as well. See lawn care and landscaping, or the full list of services.