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Garden Maintenance
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Nothing beats regular garden weeding. Garden maintenance, mulching, and fertilizing
by Environmental Construction is key to a beautiful garden.
Garden Weeding
Keeping your garden relatively weed free without the over-use of herbicides, involves
a strong sense of timing. Weeding is especially important in the spring before flowers
turn to seed. Best garden weeding months are April through August. Eliminating weeds
before they flower and turn to seed in the spring will greatly help you manage your
garden throughout the rest of the year. We recommend weekly visits in the spring
followed by monthly visits in the summer, so that our technicians can stay ahead
of your weed growth cycles.
A word about herbicide use:
Due to the long term environmental impact, we have significantly reduced our reliance
on long lasting pre-emergent herbicides. We urge you to help protect Puget Sound
and our streams and lakes by considering joining us in the limited use of herbicides.
When weeds need to be sprayed, we recommend “Burn Out” or other natural products
as your first line of attack. Check out the many forms of natural products on the
market today by visiting the Bio-control Network at biconet.com. When all else fails, and complete weed control
is absolutely necessary, we do occasionally use short term herbicides containing
Isopropylamine salt of glyphosate (such as Roundup.)
Spreading Garden Mulch
Planting beds can be mulched with old fashioned screened bark mulch or with screened
composted mulch. Both help hold moisture and help eliminate weed seed germination.
We recommend the composted mulch because mulches made of raw wood need to decompose
before the nutrients locked in the wood fiber can be absorbed by plants. The process
of decomposition takes time and the required micro organism population that causes
decomposition will rob essential plant nutrients in the process. Composted mulch
not only adds nutrients to your soil immediately, but is a terrific use of recycled
yard waste.
Top-dressing your planting beds with screened composted mulch will benefit your
planting beds in three ways:
- composted mulch helps hold moisture thus minimizing water runoff around each plant.
- composted mulch helps control soil erosion, and
- top-dressing your planting beds with screened composted mulch can be helpful at
controlling weed seed germination.
Need Landscape Service