Fall : Time for Leaf Cleanups and Irrigation Blowouts

At Oriole Landscaping, we know it’s fall when residents start calling our office to schedule leaf cleanups and irrigation “blowouts” – two crucial maintenance tasks that should be completed before you notice frost on your outdoor pumpkins.

Keeping your yard looking clean and free of leaves is not the only reason we stay on top of leave removal. A few scattered leaves is inevitable but allowing leaves to form piles or matted heaps that end up clinging to trees, shrubs and mulch is going to do damage. You don’t have to be an arborist to understand that leaves bind together and form a barrier, preventing air and water from reaching the roots and suffocating live, thriving greenery. If left alone, come spring, instead of anticipating the growth of new grass, you may find brown patches and “dead zones” underneath rotting piles of leaves. Yards left with leaves uncleared often develop:

• Mold and mildew
• Anthracnose and black spot, which are fungal diseases
• nsects, rodents and other animals, who gravitate to the safe harbor of leaves

If you have an irrigation system, you don’t want to wait much longer to have the system winterized. Just turning off the water and the irrigation controller is not enough to protect your valuable irrigation system. Some water always remains behind, especially in the valves and pipes. When temperatures reach freezing, that remaining trapped water turns to ice and damages and weakens the components of your irrigation system. So can repeated thaw-freezing-thaw episodes. In the worst cases, the system could rupture.

To keep our customers’ homes safe, we follow a straightforward “blowout” process:

• We turn off the water and the controller.
• Using an air compressor, we blow out each zone in your irrigation system, one zone at a time.
• We also perform maintenance to repair any issues on-the-spot, which can elongate the lifespan of an irrigation system.