The Wild Spaces Difference
The maintenance techniques dominating the commercial landscaping industry are the cause of many of the issues in people’s gardens. Blowers cause soil compaction, erosion of nutrients, rip apart plants, and spread plant diseases. Volcano mulching causes trunks of shrubs and trees to rot, grow roots where they shouldn’t be, and stress plants to the point of disease and death. Pruning shrubs by indiscriminately hacking limbs down to a certain length causes limbs to grow in a tangle, reducing air flow and causing fungal growth, and exposes wounds in the plant that don’t heal allowing nutrients to leak out and disease to move in. Finally, landscapers that don’t have any expertise in horticulture are likely to not know the proper care for individual plants and are known to accidentally crush or pull out plants you want because they can’t identify them.
Our way is to mimic what the plants would be exposed to in nature.
We do not use any gas-powered equipment, chemical fertilizers, or chemical weed control. Mulch is kept away from the base of plants and applied in a lighter layer so plants can breathe and get water. Pruning is performed to maintain the integrity of the plant’s natural shape by making strategic cuts only where necessary. Materials are utilized on-site when appropriate such as using leaves to mulch beds, composting debris on site, and piling sticks and branches to make cover for birds.
We can maintain an existing native garden or one that we installed. Native plant gardens are low-maintenance but some can still benefit from a bit of seasonal management.
Our packages include:
Spring Clean Up– tidying debris, pruning shrubs, dividing plants, weeding, cleaning up garden edges with edger and/or mulch. We wait to clean up debris such as plant stems and fallen leaves until temperature are consistently above 50 degrees to allow overwintering insects time to awaken and exit.
Summer Touch-Up– weeding, pruning fall blooming flowers, deadheading flowers, pruning shrubs that have bloomed
Fall Preparations for Winter– trimming plants to 12-15 inches above the ground to leave for overwintering insects, gently move fallen leave from unwanted areas to insulate around plants, prune shrubs that can take fall pruning. It is encouraged to leave most flower seed heads for winter birds to consume.
