Trimming Project in Holliston

I went with Guillerme to trim and weed a property in Holliston today. The property had just been cleaned up and mulched by another landscape company but the owners have us do the other work there.

It is about 4-8 weeks too early to be trimming but that is what this customer wanted to have done so we are making them happy. We wait until most of the new growth for the year has pushed out and also we wait for the bushes to stop their flowering for the year.

Guillerme is new to this process and I am teaching him how to do the trimming as he will be the one to do the "shearing" work when we are in that time of the season. I will be doing all of the hand clipping, which these days is most of the job along with the weeding of the beds.

Soutborough Cleanup and Mulch

Today, we are doing a clean up at a property in Southborough, Massachusetts. The owner was not pleased with the work done last year, by another crew of ours and requested that I, come and do the clean up this year.

Rich and Guillerme are assisting me with this clean up. We also have to put down loam and seed the damaged lawn areas from the snowplows. The owners have us come once a year, for the cleanup and also to do the trimming/pruning of the bushes. Usually we do not do any pruning until the bushes have pushed out their new growth for the season and the flowering has stopped for the year.

Going up the very long driveway, in the picture above, you only see a small portion of it, we have to apply Round Up to the weeds in the mulch bed. We are going to apply the Round Up twice as we will not finish this project today. We only brought one truck load of mulch and this property requires two loads.

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.