Commercial properties in Northeast Ohio are busy places.
Everyone is moving about – from employees at office parks and industrial facilities, customers at retail centers, tenants at multi-family properties, and patients and visitors at health care facilities. And these repetitive comings and goings are what drives the success of these businesses.
On consistently bustling sites like Northeast Ohio commercial facilities, how hard can installing and maintaining turf and plants be? Plant them in the soil, water them, and all is good, right?
Not so fast. What if you choose the wrong plants, and they end up withering and suffering, looking puny and faded? Or maybe you don’t maintain your lawn and plants properly and you end up with brown, shriveled greenery. If there’s a lack of pruning, you can have overgrown plants that cause safety hazards or even dead branches sticking out that just look unkempt. If you don’t plan to clean up leaves in fall or snow and ice in winter, you create similar hazards and liability issues. All these landscape issues can not only make you look bad, but they disrupt your regular flow of business, which isn’t good for anyone.
Commercial landscape management takes a planned approach to ensure your facility looks good through each and every season. The flush of growth in spring, the heat and dryness in summer, fall’s changing landscape, and winter’s frigid temperatures all require a different and precise approach to ensure your property makes it through all of Mother Nature’s challenges.
What you need to tackle this job are commercial property landscape maintenance services that meet all of your needs. Let’s talk about the most essential tasks necessary on your facility to ensure a professional-looking and thriving site all year long.
6 Essential Commercial Landscape Maintenance Services
Each type of commercial site possesses its own unique outdoor maintenance challenges. But that doesn’t mean each one shouldn’t have a great exterior.
In fact, the right commercial landscape maintenance services tailored to your facility can not only enhance its aesthetic appearance, making it look more professional, but it can also provide much-needed color and visuals that draw customers, employees, visitors, tenants, shoppers, and guests in, which is a good thing for all commercial sites.
Not sure where to start? Turfscape is here to help. These commercial property landscape maintenance ideas will help you target your budget dollars and efforts to ensure nothing gets left out and your facility shines.
1. Never Neglect Proper Lawn Care
Your lawn is usually front and center on your site, so you don’t want to ignore its care as part of your commercial landscape maintenance.
Proper mowing and fertilization, as well as annual aeration and overseeding, are key parts of keeping your grass healthy. Aeration is the removal of small soil plugs in the fall to encourage airflow and reduce soil compaction, enabling your lawn to properly take in water and nutrients. Overseeding is adding new grass seed to eliminate bare or thin areas.
2. Remember Spring and Fall Cleanups
Spring and fall cleanups are key ways to help your Northeast Ohio commercial property transition through the seasons, preparing it for the extremes of summer’s heat and winter’s cold.
When you have an agreement with a grounds maintenance company, these services usually come standard.
Each service will involve some essential tasks, including:
- Leaf cleanup, which can happen in fall and then again in spring from leaves left behind from late-dropping trees or winter weather blowing them around.
- Debris pickup, which helps keep trash off of your property.
- Lawn repair from any potential salt or winter damage, as well as drought damage after a hot summer.
- Landscape bed cleanup to ensure weeds are managed and perennials and ornamental grasses are maintained.
3. Embrace Seasonal Color
After you have perennials, shrubs, ornamental grasses, trees, and turf taken care of, the next thing you need is some color.
Bold and bright annual plant displays can give your property new interest each season, helping with your professional image and providing your site with new creative color, texture, and intrigue.
The best way to tackle seasonal color in commercial landscape installation is to embrace a proactive planning approach so that your color is installed and refreshed seasonally to match the changing weather patterns, as well as maintained to avoid looking spent. Spring displays with tulips, daffodils, hyacinth, pansies, and violas usually begin in March or April, while summer annuals are installed in May or June, and you never want to neglect fall displays with mums, ornamental kale, ornamental peppers, flowering kale, pansies, purple fountain grass, and sweet potato vines in September or October to embrace that unique season.
Proper care is essential in keeping flowers fresh and healthy and weeds at bay. Adequate and timely watering, especially, can ensure success.
When planning seasonal color, target focal points like entrances or common areas to ensure your color draws people and can be enjoyed by people on your site.
4. Don’t Forget Mulch
Nothing polishes up your commercial landscape beds like a fresh layer of mulch.
It gives your property a neat, tidy appearance, helps your soil retain moisture, suppresses weed growth, insulates soil temperatures and improves soil composition.
Replenishing mulch annually with proper prep and a fresh, even layer of double-shredded hardwood mulch to a depth of 2 to 4 inches is a perfect addition to your commercial landscape management to-do list.
5. Consider Dormant Pruning
The trees on your commercial property can add a lot of value and greenery, as well as shade and cooling effects.
White regular pruning is important to eliminate dying, dead, broken, or weak branches, another level of pruning called dormant pruning can be extremely beneficial to your commercial landscape maintenance program.
In Northeast Ohio, dormant pruning happens during the dormancy of your deciduous trees. This means timing trimming after summer growth is over, autumn leaves have dropped, and we’ve experienced multiple days of cold temperatures. This should be completed before any new growth emerges on trees in early spring.
Dormant pruning helps professionals more easily see branches, reduces tree stress, encourages spring growth, reduces pest and disease infestations, and improves safety on your site.
6. Plan Ahead for Snow & Ice
Northeast Ohio winters are never predictable. A commercial landscape maintenance plan should include planning for this season to ensure they are prepared and they don’t have business closings or access problems due to heavy snow and ice.
You have choices between seasonal service, which is a monthly rate for four months, or a per-occurrence service, which is per each snow and ice occurrence. Some companies even offer a combination of the two based on your facility’s needs and safety requirements.
When seeking a snow and ice clearance services provider, remember to ask a lot of questions to get a sense of their service offerings, contract options, pricing, and communication style. You want a partner that understands weather patterns and communicates with you to keep you abreast of what’s going on at your property.
Find a Commercial Landscape Pro That Can Help You With These Essential Commercial Landscape Management Services
If you manage a commercial site, you already know your time is limited and your plate is full.
So when you look at commercial landscape maintenance services for your property, you want it to be low-maintenance, easy to manage, and for your grounds management vendor to have an understanding of your needs.
If you're unhappy with your current contractor or looking to outsource your landscape management, consider the professionals at Turfscape. We offer year-round grounds maintenance services and will help create a plan with you that fits your property's needs and your organization's budget. We will create a customized proposal that will describe the services we recommend to keep your commercial property beautiful, functional, safe and healthy.
After all, a commercial property’s landscape maintenance program is about partnership, and Turfscape wants to help you make the fastest, most informed, and best decision for you.
Want to learn more about commercial landscape companies and their service offerings for your industrial site? Get started today with a free quote. We’ll review your options together so you can make a great choice.
