Services


Power Rake

Only heavily thatched lawns need to be power-raked. Thatch is the dead grass & roots etc., matted on top of the soil. (It is not the standing brown grass from last year). If your lawn has been fed a diet of regular chemical fertilizer over the years, this thatch layer can be quite excessive! Organic fertilizer programs, with a healthy population of microbes, continually compost this thatch back into the soil! Power-raking can be very aggressive; damaging roots & stems of the new green growth coming up in the spring! We recommend the Organic Approach of Compost Tea, with all its live biology, to do the composting back into the soil for you. This approach continuously builds up the soil with organic matter. Why would you rake-up all those bags of good organic matter from your lawn, and throw it away?

We can though, have your lawn power-raked with the conventional method.

Aerating

Very hard and clay soils need to be opened-up; to allow it to breathe- to allow better root growth, and to allow rain and watering’s to seep down deeply into the soil layers.  All the “life” in the soil, (beneficial microbes, bacteria, funji), need plenty of oxygen in the soil to do well. Aerating- (extracting plugs of soil out), helps in all this. The hole left from the extracted plug, causes the soil around it to fill into the hole- thus the tight soil around each hole becomes less tight; allowing air spaces to form between each soil particle. This is how aerating works. A better method of aerating is our new liquid gypsum (see next) treatment.

Liquid Gypsum- (better form of aerating)

Landscape Gypsum, (calcium sulphate), has long been known to “soften soil”.

How it works is, in tight clay soils, each soil particle has sort of an electrical attraction to each other. This causes each particle to be very tight to one another, with no air gaps between. Calcium Sulphate has the opposite effect. It causes the soil particles to electrically repel each other, causing air gaps to form between each other. With each rain or watering, the gypsum keeps working its way down the soil layers, doing its work, deep and deeper. This is how it “aerates”. We use a very concentrated form of liquid gypsum. (-usually, 200 lbs. or so of dry landscape gypsum granules is required). Both calcium and sulphur are nutrients your lawn loves, plus it has the added bonus of you not having all those little dirt plugs all over your yard, being dragged into the house by your kids & pets!

Organic Fertilizer Program

We use organic sources for our 3 application seasonal program for your lawn. We have tested many types of organic fertilizer, (see partial list on home page), and only use what actually produces results! Each application is a different combination of natural ingredients; as your lawns’ requirements vary throughout the season. Natural mineral-based weed suppression is a result with our fertilizer program; very effective!  (see “Why Organics” tab on home page)

Compost Tea

One of the ways in which Healthy Soil is judged is by the wide variety of beneficial micro-organisms within it. There are thousands of different kinds of good microbes, bacteria and fungi; each having a specific role to play in creating healthy plants. Some break down nutrients into a usable form, some defend against insect pests, some remedy diseases and harmful moulds, some attack bad bacteria, etc. Most Calgary soils have important varieties of these microbes completely missing !

Compost Tea is NOT merely manure and water! (this can actually harm a lawn!)Properly brewed tea first starts with an well prepared compost. A wide variety of ingredients are in our compost, including earthworm castings. This ensures a wide variety of microbes are present. A 5 lb. compost teabag is suspended in a 50 gallon specially made tea brewer. The water is de-chlorinated and brought up to room temperature. A high capacity air bubbler is placed around the bottom of the brewer and under the teabag. This supplies oxygen for the microbes, but also gentley dislodges them  from the compost, into the solution. Food for the microbes (such as molasses, fish, kelp and yucca) is added, and the brewer bubbles away for 24 to 36 hours.

A perfect breeding ground is created for good microbes only, and within that time period, they reproduce up to 10,000 times! It is this “PRO-BIOTIC” solution that is sprayed onto your lawn, shrubs, flower beds and vegetable gardens. The microbes immediately go to work for your plants; then set-up shop in your soil. Along with our Organic Fertilizer Program, they continue to thrive in your soil, creating the best bio-diversity that can possibly be!

The result? Super-healthy lawns, vibrant flowers, shrubs that thrive, and vegetables like you’ve never seen before!

Cut & Trims

We offer seasonal cut & trims; each week or every 2 weeks. Holiday cuts can be arranged for when you are away. We prefer to “mulch”, weather or conditions permitting, as it leaves valuable nutrients and organic matter there to be worked back into the soil. (It has been estimated that if one mulched a well fertilized lawn all season long, it would equate to one free application!) We have proper mulching mowers that leave no clumps behind.

If you are on our fertilizer program we co-ordinate cuts with the applications. There have been instances where another lawn cutting service had arrived a few hours after our spray, only to bag-away roughly 10-15% of the fertilizer. Again, if we mulch, the fertilizer stays there for your lawn.

Prices vary of course for size, difficulty, weekly or bi-weekly, and if for all season long or for just while you are away on holiday. (by estimate only)

As rain can throw our schedules way out of whack, sorry, we can’t promise that your lawn will be cut each “Friday”, for example.

Fall Clean-Ups

The leaves are down, time to clean-up the lawn, beds & hedges. We rake, bag, cut, (to suck up clean), and remove all for compost re-cycling. As each job is different, we charge per man-hour. (Call for rates-Book Early)

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