Wellesley and Needham Fertilizing

Today, we will be in Wellesley and Needham fertilizing our customer's properties. We will be doing all of the off-campus properties of Babson College and Olin College.

Here is a pic of Rich, using the power spreader to take care of a Babson House. You can see that spring, has not yet come around and there are no leaves on the trees. But in about 3-4 weeks it will be a completely different view. May is my favorite time of year, all of the ornamental tree's are in full bloom, and the other deciduous trees have there new leaves out.

The cool spring time weather, has had my back aching a bit, good thing I had some SUNJING with me today. All I have to do is rub it on my lower back and in a few minutes the ache is gone, amazing stuff and it is so easy to carry around with me.

Tomorrow, we will be continuing on the fertilization route, in Dover, Holliston and Sherborn, Massachusetts. I will not be finished but close to it.

Southborough and Framingham Lawn Fertilizing

For the rest of the week I will be going on my fertilizing route in different towns that we have customers in. Today, I will start off in Marlborough, Massachusetts at an Animal Hospital. My route has been reduced quite a bit due to the tough economic conditions we are experiencing here in New England. Customers are cutting back on a lot of landscape expenses this year.

While I am doing the lawn fertilization Rich, is fertilizing the ornamental bushes and trees. He is using Holly Tone, which is an organic, acidic fertilizer, which we apply in the spring and at the end of the season. We have had great success with it, it takes a while for it to work, but the acid loving, ornamental become very health and full.

One of the properties I will be fertilizing today is the boss's, in Southborough, Massachusetts. The picture, on the left is of Rob's backyard which shows a blue stone patio I worked on with Rich a few years ago. Rob has excellent design experience as you can see. I also did the brick patio around his in ground pool, but I will have to show that pic on another blog post.

After we finish in Southborough, we will also be going to Framingham to fertilize the grounds of a commercial building. This will be a long work day for Rich and I, good thing I have my CRAVE energy drink to keep me energized for the afternoon. I am really getting to enjoy having, that much extra energy in the afternoon, with out the jitters, that coffee gives me.

First Application of lawn fertilizer, for the season.

Today, I am at Olin College in Needham, Massachusetts, applying the first fertilizer application of the year. This is a large campus and I will be using forty, 50 pound bags of fertilizer to cover all of the lawn area's around the campus.

The fertilizer I am using is from LESCO and it is a Pre-Emergent herbicide, called Dimension. It contains 19% Nitrogen, 0 % Potash and 6% Sulphur along with 0.10% DIMENSION.

We use this to control new weeds from germinating, like, Dandelions, crabgrass and broad leaf weeds. This fertilizer forms a protective layer over the ground, to prevent germination, of the undesired weeds. After this application we have to wait about 10 weeks before we reseed those areas.

This will take Rich and I all day to finish. We will be fertilizing approximately 640,000 sg feet of turf. I will be using a "power spreader"made by PERMAGREEN and Rich will be doing the smaller area's with a walk behind spreader, made by LESCO.

Medfield Condominium, Seeding

Today, I am off to repair the plow damage to a Condominium over in Medfield. I have to use a pick up truck today as the dump trucks are needed for other projects. This creates a problem because the pick up can only handle one yard of loam at a time, good thing Lovell's Nursery is just down the road.

There was quite a bit of damage to the property last winter and it was due to the fact that the ground, had not really frozen hard, before the snow came, so the plows dug up the lawns easily. We ended up using 3 1/2 yards of loam and 50 pounds of seed. this was quite a bit more than last years repair. This was 4 trips to Lovell's for the day, to get loam and some other supplies.

The lady, in who is in charge of the landscape activities at the property, spoke with me about getting a quote, to completely redo 2 of the front lawns, as the owners were in the process of selling them and wanted them to look nice, to attract buyers. This, will be a project for another day.

Repairing Winter Plow Damage

I am going to be repairing, more properties, that have had damage done to them by the snowplows during the winter. Two of the properties belong to Babson College, they are homes owned by the college, and we are hired to do the landscape maintenance on them. Rich, will be helping me with this chore today.

We do this early in the season to take advantage of the spring rains, and of course to make the properties look better. However, the ground is not warm enough for the seed to germinate quickly and this year we are having a very cool spring. The seed will not germinate until the ground temperature is around 55 degrees, so we have a few weeks to go before we will see any growth. We are using Lovell's New England seed, (34.3% Creeping Red Fescue, 29.4% Laredo Perenial Rye, 24.5% AllaireII Perenial Rye and 9.8% Ken-Blue Kentucky Bluegrass) which is a very good seed and we have a lot of success using it.