Fluff up a home in Needham

Today I went with Guillerme to a property over in Needham, to weed, do some hand trimming and as we would find out later trim up a few Yews. This is a very large property, you can see part of the back yard in the picture on the above left. It is around 7 acres and had not had any attention to it since the spring and needed a little fluff up to look nice. This is also the home of the grandmother of the boy who is getting married that I posted about last week.

When we got there I noticed that the large yews in the front of the property for some reason had not been trimmed this year. I called Rob, who was at a property close by and he brought over the power shears for Guillerme top trim them up. I went around hand clipping the smaller bushes and continued with the weeding of all of the beds going around the house and a few more in the back yard.

We finished up a bit early and headed back to the shop. It was a good idea as now that the kids are back in school the traffic has increased dramatically, which just makes for a longer day. Oh well its the weekend.

Landscape update of New Customer Property

We are redo the landscape at a new property today in Needham. It is also going to be raining soon, so we will not finish today. Rich and Guillerme are assisting me on this project. The property is next to the home the President of Olin College occupies.

The new owners moved in at the end of last year and we very busy getting settled in and put off this project until now. It is a big redo of the landscape, which the previous owners had let go for a few years.

Before it rains we are going to start the job by blowing off the lawn of winter debris as we are going to be "slice seeding" the entire front yard next week. Next, I started to trim back the ornamental bushes at the front of the house. Once Rich and Guillerme caught up with me they followed behind me and raked out the beds, cut down 3 trees that had fallen over due to the snow and lack of proper maintenance. We only have time to do the front bed and part of the side beds when the rain comes. The guys will only work for so long and then it is time to call it quits for the day. We will be back soon to continue.

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.

Newton, Needham and Wellesley Cleanups

We are going to 3 smaller properties in different towns today to do spring cleanups.

The first property is in Newton, Massachusetts. I did the "bluestone" patio (see pic) and we also landscaped the back hill and sodded the small area in front of the patio last year. We were done with the cleanup here by noontime.

Next was a very small property in Needham, and the owner has decided to cut back on our services this year due to the economy and we will not be mulching her yard this year.

After that we went to a property in Wellesley that I had never been to before. The woman who owns the property is an editor of the Wellesley Weston, Magazine, that we advertise our landscaping service's in. Just a straight cleanup here, we will be back to mulch in a few weeks.

Back to the Olin President's House

Today, just two guy's, came to help me finish up the cleanup at the President's house in Needham. We went through all of the mulched beds, hand raking the winter debris out, clipping any dead branches on the ornamental bushes.

People get carried away with pruning this time of year and that is a major mistake. It is too early in the growing season to determine what needs to be trimmed. Some leaves, on the Rhododendron's turn brown over the winter and should not be pruned at all. The spring growth will push these brown leaves off in a few month's. So it is best to just prune branches that have been broken from the weight of the snow and leave all pruning until this years growth spurt has ended, usually in July and August.

I had Rich, cut down a Dogwood tree, in the perennial garden, that had been dying the past few seasons. In the same perennial bed, after we cleaned it out we put down some "organic lobster manure" to improve the soil and growing conditions. Before we left we edged all of the beds.

Due to the poor economy my landscape compnay will not be mowing the lawn here this year, but we will mulch all of the beds, fertilize the bushes, tree's and lawn area along with planting annuals and monthly weeding of the flower beds.

Rainy Monday

The rain is due to come later today and when it does that will be it for the day as the storm will last overnight.

We went over to the President of Olin College's house, in Needham, Massachusetts, to do a spring cleanup. The wife of the President, always greets us with coffee from Dunkin Donuts and homemade muffins. This makes our day and we just work that much harder for her. It's a "win-win" for us both.

There were 3 other guys with me and we only had time to use back packs to blow off the lawn, and rake out a couple of beds, before the rain came. We all went home around noon time. The cool rainy weather had my joints aching and my muscles sore so I was happy to go home and put some SUNJING on it.

Going home early used to bother me, but it does not anymore, because I can now go home and work on the home based business, that I started during the winter months. I market health and nutritional products and SUNJING is one of them. About 5 minutes after applying it to my knees and leg muscles the aching and soreness is no longer noticed. I love that stuff.