Spring Cleanup for a Healthy and Beautiful Landscape

A little spring cleaning will increase the health and beauty of your landscape and reduce ongoing maintenance throughout the season.

Remove winter protection, such as mulch, when the temperatures begin hovering around freezing or your plants are beginning to sprout. Keep some frost cloth handy to protect any tender plants from a hard freeze in late spring.

Cut back any tall ornamental grasses and perennials you left standing for the winter. Prune brown stems back to the ground and remove dead leaves on ground hugging plants. And watch for new growth that may already be peeking through the soil.

Leave the stems of butterflyweed and hardy hibiscus in place to mark their location in the garden. These perennials are late to emerge, making it easy for anxious gardeners to accidently weed them out in spring.

Then shred and compost all the debris into a valuable soil amendment.

A bit more information: Finish off your spring cleaning by managing leaves that collected in the garden over winter. Piles of matted leaves on the crowns of plants can lead to disease and decline. But don’t discard this great resource. Instead, rake or blow them off the plants, shred them with the mower and use them as mulch in the garden or add them to the compost pile.