You want to keep your Greater Chicago HOA looking its best, no matter what the time of year it is.
But chances are, you might not know which landscape maintenance services you need to perform and at what specific times of year they make the most sense.
Though there’s obviously some overlap, many of the services being performed do have a certain timeline in which you can complete them in order for them to be most effective and add the most benefit to your HOA.
And it’s important to have year-round landscape services because it boosts your property aesthetics, helps you stay within your budget, and ensures you stay on top of your goals and property improvement plans.
To help make it simple for you, we’ve rounded up a complete landscaping service calendar that includes all of the essential landscape maintenance services that should be performed on your Greater Chicago HOA in order to keep your property in tip-top shape all year-round.
Landscaping Service Calendar For HOAs
Since we know you might be looking to understand what commercial landscaping services you must perform each month for your Greater Chicago HOA, we’ve put together an easy-to-follow lawn care schedule for your convenience.
Let us walk you through the year and hopefully make your job easier and reduce your project management headaches. This can even result in savings since you’re paying a consistent monthly price for all of these services instead of trying to cram a bunch of maintenance tasks into just a few months.
Also, remember that no matter when you read this blog, the right professional commercial landscaping partner can help catch you up and get your property back on track or help you sort out your budget, goals, and expectations.
Some services are best performed at certain times of year, while others can be squeezed in sooner rather than later. The best partner will go over all of these options with you, so you can make a confident and informed decision.
January/February
January is a great time for planning commercial landscape design initiatives in your landscape planning.
Even if you had a great design in place years ago, no commercial landscape design remains perfect forever. The reason trees, shrubs, perennials and annuals add beauty to your commercial property is because they grow, change, and adapt over time. They emerge in lovely greens and bloom with bright colors, and then transition in autumn to deeper, richer hues.
But because plants grow, they need care and attention to stay healthy and look great. You can’t just plant them and ignore them or they could diminish and end up looking messy and overgrown.
Renovating areas of your HOA or adding a new landscape amenity is a great task to plan in January. This way you can plan ahead, talk about your priorities, and then put them on a schedule that works for you to ensure your budget lines up with your goals.
Your commercial landscape partner can help you focus on areas that make the most sense to increase the positive attributes of your HOA.
March/April
Another landscape planning to-do that can instantly elevate your HOA is the addition of spring annuals.
Greater Chicago definitely craves color after a long winter. Spring annuals give you a chance to provide color before your competitors and before other plants begin blooming.
There are many choices when it comes to spring annual color. Fall bulbs like tulips, daffodils, and hyacinths can pop up early in spring giving your HOA brilliant whites, yellows, and blues.
Flowering shrubs can also add pops of color to draw tenants in. Adding creeping phlox, pansies, and violas in March can bring amazing frost-resistant, cold-tolerant blooms to the commercial landscape that come in a wide range of cool and warm tones.
And, as the weather is warming up in Greater Chicago, it’s time to focus on your lawn care calendar.
Winter weather can wreak havoc on your HOA turf. This happens from the buildup of heavy snow and ice on your property, which can lead to winter burn, especially when winters get out of control.
To combat this, your commercial service professional will look for snow mold potential where the lawn looks matted down, trapping moisture. These areas can easily result in disease, showing tan or pink splotches. Most lawns will recover, but raking out the worst spots can help dry them out and bring in air to get rid of snow mold.
And your commercial maintenance crew will also reseed any turf areas that suffered plow damage so they can recover and look new.
In addition to turf repair in early spring, spring fertilization is also important for commercial turf. It gives your lawn the nutrients it needs to develop top growth. A pre-emergent herbicide application at this time can also help handle pesky spring and early summer weeds before they get a chance to establish themselves in your grass.
May/June
Next on your landscaping service calendar is mulch.
Mulch adds value and color to your commercial landscape. It suppresses weeds, maintains soil moisture and temperatures, and adds some important organic matter back into the soil as it breaks down.
For maximum benefits, the ideal mulch application is approximately 2 inches of double-shredded hardwood mulch.
On top of all of this, mulch also makes your HOA landscape beds look polished and professional, giving them curb appeal and a value-boosting edge.
In June, it’s time for some more color. Summer annuals are great ways to draw the eyes in, as well as around signage to boost brand recognition. Areas where people hang out – recreation areas or walking paths, for instance – can also get a dose of some vibrant color to keep people who live in your HOA happy and keep it attractive for attracting new tenants.
July/August
Next on the lawn care calendar at your HOA is staying on top of insects. Your commercial grounds professional will use preventive grub control and insecticides to target surface feeding pests to keep your lawn, trees, and shrubs healthy.
This is also a great time of year to focus on hardscaping, which includes all nonliving elements in the landscape like patios, pergolas, walkways, benches, bricks, stones, rocks, boulders, gravel, wood, and lighting. And these are key components of your HOA landscaping.
Paver patios and walkways can complement other areas of your commercial site while providing key spots for function. Hardscapes like retaining walls can control erosion and create tidy landscape beds while also looking beautiful.
You also want to make sure you’ve secured a snow and ice management professional to take care of winter weather and keep access to your HOA open.
September/October
Your landscaping service calendar should include lawn maintenance tasks that can prime your HOA landscaping for better growth the next year.
Aeration and overseeding your lawn are great tasks to perform in September to improve it. Aeration, as the removal of small plugs of soil, gives your tired, worn, compacted lawn a chance to more easily receive oxygen, nutrients, and water at the root level where it’s needed most.
Overseeding is also great here because those aeration plugs create the perfect holes for the seed to contact the soil and germinate. This improves the germination process, making overseeding more successful in strengthening and thickening your HOA lawn.
Also, flowers aren’t just for one season as part of your landscape planning calendar. You can have seasonal color all year long in Greater Chicago.
In autumn, flowers like mums, kale, ornamental cabbage, ornamental peppers, purple fountain grass, and sweet potato vines can add texture and impact to your containers or commercial landscape beds.
Remember to target these colors in your more high-impact, highly visible areas on your HOA site, including near signage, entryways, gathering spots, etc.
November/December
Before winter arrives, you want to clean leaves up from the fall by raking them or blowing them into piles and disposing of them to keep your HOA lawn looking good. This also prepares it for winter as part of your lawn care calendar.
This is important because leaves left on your lawn can become wet from snow and ice and smother your turf during the winter, causing diseases to erupt.
Along with this, your commercial landscape professional will also do a fall fertilization and final pre-emergent weed control to target root growth going into winter and stay ahead of any weeds that will sit and wait to sprout up in early spring in your HOA lawn.
In December, you want to make sure you think about dormant pruning for your trees and shrubs. This timing is ideal specifically after the leaves have fallen and Greater Chicago has gone through multiple days of really cold temperatures.
When all of the leaves have fallen off of your deciduous plants and shrubs, it’s much easier to see the tree’s structure while trimming. This makes broken, dead, and dying branches stick out, so they are easier to prune. This is also helpful if you need to prune to ensure more sunlight reaches the plant’s entire structure.
Dormant pruning also causes less stress on the plant and allows for robust new growth the following spring. This practice also ensures you’re trimming when insects and diseases are less likely to take advantage of open wounds before they heal.
Stay Ahead of Your Commercial Landscaping Service Calendar With KD Landscape
When your HOA looks great year-round in Greater Chicago, you enhance your business image and elevate your curb appeal.
We hope this monthly landscape planning calendar helps you do just that. A proactive approach done by a professional grounds maintenance service provider can keep you on schedule, as well as help you plan for the future.
If you still have questions or need to get on a better schedule for your site, consider KD Landscape. We can save you time and energy and keep your HOA looking polished and professional. We can also recommend some great ideas to make your facility look better.
Want to learn more about our commercial maintenance services for your Greater Chicago commercial site? Get started today with a landscape consultation. We’ll review your options together, so you can make a great choice.
