Whether you’ve lived in Calgary for your whole life or this is your first time owning property in Calgary’s sunniest city, you know that summer can feel like a fleeting moment, and fall weather is here before you know it. It’s likely that you’ll have had a solid summer lawncare routine in place, including frequent aeration, watering and mowing, to keep your grass healthy and green all season long. Fall can be a dangerous time, however, when many residents taper off their lawncare maintenance schedule. This not only means that your lawn will lose its lustre as you start to spend less time outside, but you also aren’t putting the work in now for a quick and healthy start once the last of the snowpack melts.
Dealing with Debris
One of the biggest barriers to a pristine fall lawn is the debris that falls on your yard on a daily basis. While the changing leaf colours looks pretty, and it’s all part of nature’s plan to get the trees and shrubs ready for winter, leaf debris causes many issues for your lawn
Don’t Leaf It Alone
Fallen leaves cause problems for your grass in a variety of ways. Firstly, they take a long time to decompose. In the meantime, they are blocking sunshine from reaching the grass plants, and even though the days are getting shorter and there’s less sunshine around, every sun ray counts to help build healthy roots for spring growth.
Secondly, they are still waterproof, meaning that any rain that falls on your lawn gets concentrated on the edge of the leaf matter. This means that some parts of your lawn are drowning from excess water while the patches under the leaves are quickly dehydrating.
Finally, piles of leaves make for excellent homes for small rodents. Their droppings aren’t great for your lawn, and they also tend to attract bigger carnivorous predators, who definitely shouldn’t be allowed to defecate on your lawn. Once the critters peg your house as somewhere that offers a dry and warm place for a winter nest, you’ll struggle to get rid of them again.
Leaf Cleanup Solutions
It’s pretty obvious, therefore, that you need to take care of your leaf buildup to get a pristine fall lawn this year. Fortunately, with a little preparation, and an eye on the weather, it’s easy to keep your lawn leaf free and keep your lawn looking great all season long.
Mulch and mow
The easiest and most effective way to deal with your leaf debris is to keep mowing your lawn through the fall months. While you don’t want to chop it so close that no photosynthesis occurs, you can keep your grass at a short length to make sure you get all the leaves chopped up. You can choose to bag the leaf and grass clippings, but if the weather has been mainly dry, you’ll actually provide a fine layer of lawn mulch by just blowing the chopped up leaves over your grass as you mow. If it’s been wet, you can bag them as you go, and then leave them to cure in a dry space to spread as additional natural mulch later in the season.
The city of Calgary also has a couple of options when it comes to leaf disposal, either in the green carts or in paper yard waste disposal bags. For larger loads, or if you can’t wait for the leaves to be picked up by the city, you can take them in paper yard waste bags to City Eco Centres, being careful of course not to mix in any other garbage with your yard waste.
Rake and Blow
If your lawn is a little too large for mowing, or you simply want the physical workout of cleaning up your lawn, then raking is the way forward. You should have two types of rakes: a wide fan plastic rake for dry leaves, and a thinner one with metal tines to get hold of wet leaves and other debris. The benefit of raking over mowing is that it can lightly aerate the top layer of soil as you go which helps to bring oxygen and water to the lower parts of the grass plants. Once you’ve got your leaves raked up, you should then invest in a leaf blower (either bought or rented for the day) to either blow your leaves into your garden beds for natural mulch or into piles that are easy to scoop up.
Get Professional Help
Your time is precious, especially when the summer fun ends and school and work kick back into full gear. Taking the time to clean your lawn up and keep it looking pristine can fall down your list of priorities, so if this is your situation, it’s time to pick up the phone to Scoop Cut N Shovel. Our team of landscaping and property maintenance experts will work with you to organize your fall clean up. This could be just a one off visit to give you a good start to the season, or to finalize your garden prep before the snow starts to fly. It could also be a more frequent set of trips so you don’t have to worry about the hard work needed to maintain a pristine fall lawn.
Subscribe and Save
Once you’ve seen the benefits of getting professional help with your leaf cleanup, you will want to talk to us about our other subscription services. For example, we offer the mirror service to our fall clean up in the spring, where we’ll come to your property once all the snow has melted to clear your lawn and set you up for success for a pristine spring lawn. We can also work out a plan for your summer lawn maintenance and work on getting your garden beds ready for their best growing season ever. For the winter months, we offer a snow and ice clearing service to keep you and your family moving all season long, leaving you to relax and enjoy the best of the cold Calgary months.