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! Lush Lawns recommends 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 good organic matter from your lawn, and throw it away?

However, if you have been using chemical fertilizers or have a neglected lawn, we are happy to perform this service for you.

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 water to seep down deeply into the soil layers.  All the “life” in the soil, (beneficial microbes, bacteria, fungi), need plenty of oxygen to thrive. Aerating (extracting out plugs of soil), aides in all these requirements. 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 a sort of electrical attraction to each other. This causes each particle to be very tight to one another, with no air gaps in-between. Calcium Sulfate has the opposite effect. It causes the soil particles to electrically repel each other, causing air gaps to form in- between. 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 sulfur 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

Lush Lawns uses 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 incorporated into Lush Lawns fertilizer program and is 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 molds, 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 well prepared compost. Lush Lawns uses a variety of high quality natural ingredients in our Tea, including earthworm castings. This ensures a wide variety of microbes are present and a perfect breeding ground is created for good microbes only. 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 inn 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

Lush Lawns offers seasonal weekly or bi-weekly cut & trims. Holiday for when you are away can also be arranged. We prefer to “mulch”, weather and 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 a client of Lush Lawns 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 application, only to bag-away roughly 10-15% of the fertilizer. Again, if we mulch, the fertilizer stays there for your lawn.

Prices vary due to size, difficulty, frequency and if for seasonal or holiday cuts. (Prices are by estimate only)

Weather can disrupt our services, due to this, Lush Lawns can not promise that your lawn will be cut “every Friday” for example.


Fall Clean-Ups

The leaves are down, time to clean-up the lawn, beds & hedges. Lush Lawns rakes, bags and cuts your lawn and the fall debris is ready for compost or compost recycling.  There is a charge for removal of this debris. As each job is different, we charge per man-hour. (Call for rates-Book Early)

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