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Uncover everything you need to know about grounds maintenance, including what it entails, which grounds maintenance services you need, how often they need doing, and more.
Are you looking to take better care of your outdoor spaces?
Look no further!
This comprehensive guide details everything you need to know about grounds maintenance. Whether you’re keen to put in the hard work yourself or want to enlist the help of a pro, this blog covers all the ground maintenance jobs you need to tackle to keep your garden thriving all year long.
Ground maintenance refers to the continuous upkeep of outdoor areas to ensure they are safe, usable, and visually appealing.
The types of outdoor areas that use or require garden maintenance services are varied and include residential gardens, public green spaces, outside sporting facilities (such as golf courses), cemeteries and more.
Garden maintenance can either be practised by professionals or by yourself, depending on the type and scale of your grounds. Due to the varied and persistent nature of green areas, hiring grounds maintenance contractors is often the best option for those looking to keep their outdoor spaces thriving all year round.
If you’re lucky enough to own some green space, you’ll know how much it takes to keep it in top form. Grounds maintenance encompasses pretty much every service required to keep outdoor spaces at their best, ranging from preventative services to reactive ones, including:
For those at the beginning of their grounds maintenance journey, landscaping is an essential starting point.
Landscaping entails the design, construction and maintenance of outdoor spaces; it is an art that aims to balance the natural with the manmade.
It includes services and steps such as:
• Considering stylistic approach – e.g. English garden style, oriental, woodland etc.
• The design and creation of outdoor living areas – e.g. BBQ area, outdoor dining etc.
• Establishing and building boundaries
• Planting trees and plants
• Considering topography and existing features
• The incorporation of water features
• The placement of beds
Due to the shifting seasons and ever-changing nature of the outdoors, landscaping is never complete, and it ties in well with other elements of continuous grounds maintenance.
From the minute those seeds are sown, lawns and turfs require a lot of maintenance. Although grass seems to be everywhere, it often requires a lot of attention. Lawn and turf care involves:
• Watering
• Mowing
• Trimming
• Fertilising
• Aerating
• Mulching
• Seeding
• Weeding
Cutting and pruning not only helps maintain the aesthetic of your grounds, but also ensures they remain safe and usable. There are many other reasons why pruning your trees and hedges is beneficial. For example, to:
• Remove defective/dead branches
• Reduce shade
• Increase the lifespan of a plant
• Enhance blossom and fruit production
• Encourage growth
• Prevent damage to property
Garden clearance involves removing any unwanted items or materials from your grounds, both those that have naturally appeared and those that have been placed there.
Garden clearance includes the removal of:
• Grass cuttings/trimmings from other vegetation
• Fallen leaves, branches and debris
• Unused furniture and equipment
• Obsolete fencing
• Unused outhouses and sheds
• Construction materials, waste and mess
Border restoration applies to both the wider borders of a garden grounds and the internal borders between its sections. Many gardens, for example, have structured flower or herb beds, separated by wooden planks or other manmade borders.
Border restoration involves the following processes:
• Addressing plant health and placement
• Weed removal
• Improving soil quality e.g. improving drainage and nutrient content
• Pruning and relocating plants
• Planting new plants
• Defining new or existing areas with edging using hard materials such as concrete, wood or stone
Other services that exist under the umbrella of grounds maintenance include pest control, fence maintenance, sports pitch maintenance, and other specialist grounds requirements.
If you want a well-kept garden all year round, here’s a handy checklist to refer to!
Regular Grounds Maintenance Jobs
Regular ground maintenance jobs are the ones that need doing frequently, throughout the year. These include:
Grass typically needs to be mowed at least once per month if you want to maintain a neat aesthetic, depending on the season and weather conditions. During the primary growing season, which is from March to October, you should be mowing your grass at least once per fortnight. In general, mowing frequency should be upped during wet periods and decreased during dry ones.
Staying on top of your weeding is essential, as the younger a weed is, the easier it is to remove. Because of this, weeding should be done once per week during growing season, and at least once per month throughout the rest of the year.
Regular hoeing is a great way to disrupt weed growth if you don’t have the time or resources to pull weeds every week.
As we all learned in school, plants need water to survive. In general, gardens and their plants need watering at least once per week, although this varies from plant to plant.
A good rule of thumb is to ensure your plants get one inch of water per week – and that can include rainfall, so always remember to factor in the weather.
Some plants require much more frequent attention than others, so make sure you research the needs of the plants you have to ensure they receive the best care. For example, some types of bedded flowers require daily watering!
This should be on your daily checklist! The more frequently you check for problems, the earlier you will identify them, and the easier it will be to treat them.
To maximise grass health and growth, lawns should be aerated and fertilised at least once per year, ideally in spring or autumn. However, this can vary depending on the type of soil you use and the amount of foot traffic your lawn receives.
Shrubs and hedges require pruning between 1 and 3 times per year, depending on their type and your desired aesthetic.
In general, informal hedges should be trimmed once a year, and formal hedges twice. Try to avoid pruning hedges between March and August, which is the typical bird-nesting season.
With flowering shrubs, timing is everything. For spring-flowering shrubs, make sure you prune them after they have finished flowering. Summer-flowering shrubs, on the other hand, should be pruned in late winter or early spring, before their flowering period begins.
Once a year, ideally, in spring or autumn, mulch should be applied to any thin spots or bare patches on your lawn. The benefits of annual mulching include improved soil health, increased moisture retention, weed suppression and temperature regulation.
Grounds maintenance is a continual journey that requires dedication, time, resources and patience. At Instant Scenery, we’ve spent over 12 years honing our craft and perfecting the art of efficient maintenance.
That’s why you can leave the hard graft to us and trust that we will keep your garden looking pristine all year round.
Check out our annual maintenance plan, which provides all the grounds maintenance services you need to suit your land and keep it thriving.
To book an initial consultation or to find out more about our services, visit our website today or call us on 01905 347105.
