It’s October, 2018, and leaf season is here. Landscape contractors rely on their backpack blowers to clean-up leaf avalanches on their sites. If you drive around you’re bound to see a few a rose-cheeked landscapers blowing for hours.

I personally don’t stress about leaves. I love fall and I clean up the leaves as well as I can. Then I return the following week for more.

Aside from leaf clean-up blowing, there are two more blowing techniques every landscaper must know.

Pre-blow

Early in leaf season when the leaf drop isn’t overwhelming, a pre-blow can be a great time saver. Pre-blow involves a quick blow of your site where leaves are blown onto lawns and then mowed. This eliminates time consuming leaf pile pick-up with rakes.

Simply mow over the leaves and bag everything. Then all that’s left to do is a final touch up blow. The only issue is judging the right amount of leaves. If the leaves really accumulate after your pre-blow, the mower will struggle to shred them when you mow. Don’t kill your mower. That’s why this technique is best used early in the leaf season. I think it could be used more in landscape maintenance.

This is a well executed pre-blow. There isn’t enough leafiness to overwhelm the mower engine or to start raking piles.

Final blow

As the name suggests, this is the final courtesy clean-up blow. But I’m finding that many new employees only concentrate on the actual clean-up. With proper training they would know that their final blow also doubles as the final check.

Yes, foremen are responsible for checking their sites in theory but it’s not always easy in practice. That’s because some strata sites are huge and asking the foremen to walk the entire site at the end of the day can be too much.

So the worker doing the final blow is responsible for checking everything over as she goes. That includes missed debris piles, full green waste tarps, empty tarps, open gates and missed hand tools. It’s up to the worker to alert the foreman so we avoid calls to the office later.

Lawn care mistakes must also be corrected. Mistakes happen. Nobody goes home until missed lawns are mowed and huge mohawks eliminated.

Again, I find that new workers aren’t trained to perform final site checks when they blow. Once they get into the habit everything runs smoothly.

When a missing hand tool is discovered on site later, it means that the area wasn’t blown or the worker only occupied himself with blowing, not checking.

This missed tarp was discovered during the final blow.

This yard didn’t get mowed at all.

Conclusion

Consider training your landscape workers to perform pre-blows and final blows with site checking. Your whole operation will be smoother.

It drives me crazy when I see my landscape installs neglected and suffering from lack of water. It must be the biophilia effect because I feel responsible for the suffering plants. An yet, I can’t do much about it because it’s up to the owners to water their plants. I water them in on install day.

Water for success

This is your main take-away from this blog post: new plants require copious amounts of water to properly establish. As water goes in, roots chase it down and extend. And on it goes but not without water.

Disappointing.

This is the worst case because I did everything myself. I removed the dead cedars, dug the holes, bought and delivered the new cedars (Thuja occidentalis ‘Smaragd‘), planted them and watered them in. Months later I took this picture with some disgust. Directly behind me was a perfectly functioning garden hose. It just takes time to properly soak the cedars once in a while. Cedars are very thirsty in their first year.

Magnolia

Because of our summer drought this Magnolia tree exhibited early leaf senescence. With some watering from me it bounced back by pushing out new foliage. The cedars behind the tree weren’t so lucky. To be fair, shading from the Magnolia becomes permanent over time but I suspect lack of water was also a major contributor to this carnage.

Note the garden hose in the picture. I have no idea why it can’t be turned on and left to soak the area for twenty minutes. Again, it’s up to the owners to water.

Success!

Luckily, some owners get it. This unit has two little kids and the owners water. Plus they installed a soaker hose so their new cedar hedge would establish. This space used to be bare with only two stumps to look at and I, literally, paid for this install with my blood. Because the nearby creek breeds a lot of summer mosquitos this project was an adventure. My next blog post will be on my intimate knowledge of insect repellents.

These owners get a gold start for watering.

As we ease into fall, there will be more landscape installs. It’s absolutely critical that owners water their new plants. Good plant establishment can only happen with good watering.