A well-maintained commercial landscape always makes a great impression. If you’re looking to elevate your property from well-maintained to pristine, there’s a secret to making that change: soil health and pruning standards.

Impressive features like floral installations and unique landscape designs are the more obvious choices for making a great impression, but must be founded on healthy soil and have a routine pruning schedule to stay up-to-date. Healthy commercial landscapes start from the ground up!

Soil Health

A great landscape is only as great as the soil it is founded on. By starting with soil health, your commercial landscape has a foundation to thrive.

Great turf care necessitates healthy soil for growth and freshness. Fertilizer strengthens the soil and provides beneficial macronutrients, including nitrogen, for conditioning. This promotes a healthy environment for roots to take hold.

After roots have settled in the soil, the grass and soil can absorb water more efficiently. This leads to a full, thick lawn that is a healthy environment for beneficial growth, as well as more easily prevents weeds from growing.

Pruning Standards

A routinely-pruned commercial landscape is aesthetically pleasing. By removing overgrowth and maintaining natural plant shapes, your commercial landscape appeals to the eye and creates a welcoming environment.

But pruning isn’t just for aesthetic purposes — it also promotes the health of your landscape’s greenery. Pruning removes branches that have become diseased or damaged, and their removal saves the health of the rest of the plant. Proper pruning maintains air circulation that helps plants thrive. A healthy plant is a beautiful plant!

Chapel Valley’s Experts Know How to Care for Your Commercial Landscape

While some plants are best maintained with routine pruning, others require little pruning. When paired with great soil care, a commercial landscape not only looks fantastic, but can thrive and among the natural environment.

Our team of landscape experts know how to best care for your property’s greenery, and will only prune when necessary. We want your commercial landscape to look its best.

Mike Bauer

“Winter” or “dormant” pruning is an essential horticultural practice that an educated and experienced landscape contractor will utilize at their discretion. This is essentially a hard cutback (more than you would cut with hand pruners or shears during a typical pruning session) to reshape the plant and to encourage new growth to form towards the inside of the plant. As plants are pruned during the summer months, a landscaper will strategically take as little plant material off during each pruning to avoid plant stress during hot temperatures. Because of this, the plant will start to form more leaves on the outside of the plant and less on the inside, creating a very bare environment in the middle of the plant over time. It is imperative that most woody shrubs are dormant pruned at strategic intervals during their life cycle. Not every shrub needs yearly dormant pruning, but some do. Your dedicated landscape professional should be able to distinguish which ones those are.

Depending on the plant variety and the amount of sunlight the plant receives each day, be prepared for a relatively slow grow back, especially if these cutbacks are performed in the dead of winter. If viable, we recommend waiting as close to March as possible, with days now starting to get longer which will promote more sunlight and rapid photosynthetic growth. This will shorten the amount of time the plant will remain bare, with Spring becoming the first active growing period of the year for most woody plant material. If hard cutbacks are being done in heavily shaded areas throughout the year, be prepared for an even longer grow back period. Depending on the severity of the cutback needed, it could take over a year for a plant to regain its natural vigor when in a heavily shaded area. 

Dormant pruning also has other perks as well. It can apply to trees too for instance, as this is a great time to provide limb ups and more major cutbacks on them. Less sap is lost in the wintertime which puts less stress on the tree. Dormant pruning in the winter is also great because it can reduce the transmission of diseases and pests, mainly since the frigid temperatures inhibit activity of both.

Whether you are attempting to tackle dormant pruning on your own or trusting a landscape expert, do your research and come up with a plan this winter. Hopefully the points made above will help you give you a baseline of what needs to be done and what to expect given the circumstance.  Please reach out to us today to discuss your dormant pruning needs.