One of the maintenance tasks we do every year is prepping our yard for the impending warm weather. Though we clean up the yard in the fall as well, every spring the snow melts and the yard looks, well, like crap. Though it seems like prepping your yard for spring might be as easy as a quick clean-up, my experience is yard maintenance is rarely without any cost so I like to do it as inexpensive as possible.
General Exterior Cleaning
The house gets dirty over the winter with salty snow and general grime. We do a quick pressure wash of the entire house. We’re fortunate enough to own our own pressure washer but you can usually rent them by the day at local home hardware-type stores if you don’t own, or have access to one. It’s amazing how dirty the house gets and how clean it looks when it’s done. Doing this every year or two rather than waiting for the house to get really dirty will make your job easier. Obviously if you have a lot of trees and shelter you’ll get more ”buildup” on your home than someone with little to no foliage to contend with.
Fixing Up
Go around the property and make note of anything that may need fixing. For us, the front door has a scratch in the paint that needs attention as well the front garden bed suffered with the frost this winter and the stones are now sinking into our yard and pulling away from the framework. We also managed to lose a drain spout this winter, probably the high winds, which needs repair or my plants below will be a beating with the first heavy rainfall. We made note of everything that needs to get done and started pricing stuff out. Luckily it shouldn’t cost us more than probably $50 to fix everything but making this list early will give you time to shop around and find sales.
Yard work
Depending on what you have in terms of property layout this will vary. I spent a day cleaning up the plants that had died in the autumn frost and prepping the garden for the arrival of the new plants. Once everything was clean I was able to get an idea for what we will need for stuff like mulch and dirt. Again, doing this early allows me to shop the sales for a few weeks. In terms of ”tools” required I’ve had good success with the gardening section at my local dollar store for stuff like gloves and gardening tools.
Planning New Projects
Once all the regular maintenance is done you’ll be able to make plans for new or future projects. We plan on putting in a vegetable garden (finally) this year and now that the yard is prepped we have a pretty exact idea where it will go. Thanks to sites like Pinterest I’ve also found some pretty good, and cheap, options that I’m excited to try since this is an area that can get crazy expensive if I let it!
What do you do every spring to get your yard ready?
As a renter, there’s not much for me to do to prep my yard (if you can even call it a yard!). There’s usually just garbage laying around that’s blow into my space and maybe some minor raking to be done, but the rest is covered (or in most cases not) by the landlord. It would be nice to have the building pressure-washed – I’ve seen how much of a difference that can make!
The joys of renting 🙂
We started our yard cleanup two weeks ago and did more this weekend. It’s looking a lot better but could still use more work. I might try to pace myself with the rest of the work. I’m not an avid gardener so I find this stuff is a real chore. Any ideas for self motivation? 😉
I have a bunch more to do myself! Always something 🙂
Our main yard cleanup involves getting our vegetable garden planted. Roto-tilling the weeds and old plants into the soil is probably the most work. (Last year my wife was roto-tilling the garden and she cut through the main water line to the back yard irrigation. At least we now know what area to stay away from.) Then it’s just a matter of planting seeds and laying out the drip lines.
Oh man :S
We don’t have spring here in our country. We always have sunny days or sometimes the rainy days, hehe. Yet, even we don’t have spring, we managed to clean up our yard and put some designs on it.
haha we don’t really get ”spring” either 😉