Fall Clean-Up Services in Westchester County and Putnam

A fall clean-up is a package, not an account. We start somewhere in October, work the property in rounds as the canopy comes down, and finish in December with the lawn cut short for winter, the beds cut back and edged, the gutters clear and every bag and tarp of debris hauled off site. Then we are gone until spring. There is nothing to cancel and nothing that rolls over.

You do not need to be on our weekly lawn service to book one. A good share of the properties we clean up in November we have never mowed.

Everything leaves the property. A leaf pile parked against a stone wall or a foundation stays wet all winter and holds that moisture against whatever it is touching.

The canopy in northern Westchester does not drop all at once, and this is the single thing that decides whether a clean-up worked. Maples, ash and birch let go through the middle and back half of October. The oaks hold weeks longer, often into the back half of November, and then drop most of their load inside a week or two once a hard wind gets at them. Beech and some young oaks will hang on to brown leaves right through the winter.

So one visit in early November is not a fall clean-up. It is a clean lawn for about three weeks and a property buried again by December. On a wooded lot we plan rounds instead. An early pass takes the maple drop off turf that is still growing, and the final pass goes in after the oaks have finished. That last one is the pass that has to happen.

How many rounds a property needs comes down to what is growing on it and what is growing next door. An open lot in Pleasantville with two ornamental trees can be one visit and done. A place off Guard Hill Road under mature oaks, with the neighbor's canopy feeding it too, is realistically three. Nelson walks it and tells you which one you have.

Leaves either get mulched back into the turf or hauled off the property, and the amount of canopy overhead decides which. Mulch-mowing shreds a light, dry layer into the lawn, where it breaks down over the winter and feeds the soil. Nothing leaves the property, and on an open lot with a handful of trees it is the better answer.

It stops working as the layer gets deeper. Under a mature oak canopy, which is most of what we work on up here, the drop is well past what a mower can shred, and wet oak leaves do not chop fine. They pack down instead. Plenty of properties are both jobs: mulch the light early drop in October, haul the heavy November load.

A packed layer left on grass all winter holds water against the crown in the dark, and snow settles on top and keeps it saturated. That is the condition snow mold wants. It shows up in March as gray or pink matted circles and bare patches where the turf did not survive, which puts you into seed, topsoil and a repair visit, waiting until June for the lawn to fill in.

The same layer rots perennial crowns in the beds, and on bluestone or pavers it leaves a slick, stained surface that has to be washed rather than swept.

Cutting beds back in fall is not a matter of shearing everything to the ground. Some perennials should go. Hosta, daylily and peony foliage collapses into wet slime that harbors disease over the winter, and anything that came out of the season with mildew or leaf spot leaves with us rather than overwintering in the bed.

Other plants earn their keep by staying up. Coneflower, black-eyed Susan, sedum and ornamental grasses hold seed heads that feed goldfinches, juncos and chickadees through the hardest weeks of winter, and the standing stems catch snow, which insulates the crown better than bare ground. They get cut back in early spring before new growth pushes. Lavender, butterfly bush and the other woody sub-shrubs are left alone until spring too, because cutting them going into winter opens them to cold damage. Lilac, forsythia and bigleaf hydrangea set next year's buds in summer, so pruning them now is how people lose a season of flowers.

Then the bed lines get re-cut. A clean, deep spade edge holds through freeze and thaw, keeps winter debris and thrown snow out of the beds, and gives the spring mulch a real edge to sit against.