Waltham Voices: A monthly guide to maintaining your landscape

This is the first in a series of articles with tips for maintaining your landscape, using 90 percent less time and effort compared with traditional methods. Each months column will lay out what you need to do, based on the weather patterns here in Waltham. In other words, we will follow the local plant phenology (the study of how seasonal light changes and weather influence plant life cycles) for a do-it-right-the-first-time approach that provides safety, value, convenience and beauty through horticultural expertise and sustainable design.

-Safety: Removing hazardous sticks and branches, blocked sight lines, slippery areas and poison ivy, while maintaining effective lighting, drainage and security.

-Value: Adding to your property value through aesthetics, better air quality, rainwater management, reduced noise and an improved balance of shade vs. sun.

-Convenience: Using the proper tools and correct timing for results that last longer, keep you and your neighbors more satisfied, and provide faster completion of seasonal chores at lower cost.

-Beauty: While effecting safety, value and convenience, also gaining proper proportion, balance, form and density as well as color. Making everything from drainage management to the development of utility space meet your aesthetic standards that consider key views, seen from both inside and outside you home.

No matter the size of your property, these principles are the same, and become only more important within the small spaces typical of many Waltham yards.

January: Systems Documentation

You may perceive our cold Waltham Januaries as a rest time for landscape management, but in fact this is when we do critical work that sets the course for the year.

Most property owners are at the mercy of their memories to keep track of what has been done in their landscapes and the locations of the underlying systems. This causes waste when the person with the institutional memory leaves, and someone new must start fresh, or when contractors do harm or need to take more time and charge more money because of unknown factors such as the depth of pipe, location of wire, or species of tree.

See more here:
Waltham Voices: A monthly guide to maintaining your landscape