Landscaping and Grounds Care

What a season looks like here, start to finish

Spring clean-up comes first, usually late March into April. The winter's leaf and branch litter comes off the beds, the perennials that were left standing through the winter get cut back, the lawn gets its first cut and a proper edge, and the irrigation is brought up and tested. That test matters more than it sounds: a backflow device that failed over the winter is found on the first day of the season or on the day the lawn dies.

May and June are the growth spike, when the lawn is cut weekly and the beds get weeded before the weeds get ahead. July and August turn into water management, and the mowing height goes up rather than down, because longer grass shades its own roots and holds moisture in sandy soil. This is also when the property is full of people, so the schedule works around the house rather than the other way round.

September and October are the best weeks of the year for lawn work on the Cape. The soil is still warm, the nights have cooled, and weed pressure has dropped, which makes early autumn the right time to aerate and overseed rather than fighting the same job in May. Bulbs go in. The leaf passes start. November is the cut-back and the last mow, the gutters, and the irrigation blow-out, which has to happen before the first hard freeze rather than the first convenient week. Through the winter the grounds work is storm work: branches down, debris off the lawn, and a look at anything that shifted.

What survives the wind and the salt

Salt reaches a Cape garden in two ways, and they call for different answers. Salt spray is carried on the wind and burns the windward side of foliage, which is why a hedge browns on one face in March while the sheltered side looks untouched. People often read that as disease and reach for a spray. It is usually wind and desiccation, and the honest response is either shelter or a species that tolerates it. Soil salinity, nearer a marsh or a road that gets treated, is the slower problem and shows up in the roots.

The plants that hold up on an exposed Cape lot are mostly the ones that were already here: bayberry, beach plum, rugosa rose, inkberry, juniper, little bluestem and the native grasses. They take wind, sand and thin soil without complaint. The classic Cape hydrangea is worth its reputation but it has a real weakness, which is that a hard cold snap after a mild spell will kill next summer's flower buds on the older varieties while leaving the plant itself perfectly healthy. A bare hydrangea in July is nearly always that, not neglect.

And the question everybody asks: the blue is soil chemistry, not variety. Acidic soil makes aluminium available to the plant and the flowers come blue; sweeten the soil and the same plant turns pink. Cape soils are sandy and naturally acidic, which is why the blue is everywhere here and far rarer inland. Sandy soil also drains fast and holds almost no nutrient, so the real amendment is organic matter and compost, not another bag of fertiliser.

Irrigation, water restrictions and what runs off

The Cape's drinking water comes out of a single sole-source aquifer directly beneath us, and nitrogen reaching the estuaries is one of the defining environmental problems of the region. That is why the fertiliser question carries more weight here than it does inland: what goes onto a Centerville lawn does not leave the peninsula. We would rather feed a lawn less often and feed the soil instead, and on most properties that produces a better lawn anyway.

Outdoor watering restrictions are a normal part of a Cape summer, and the sensible response is to set the controller to whatever the restriction is rather than fight it. Deep and infrequent beats short and daily in any case: a lawn watered lightly every morning grows a shallow root system that cannot survive the first week the water is turned off. Early morning is the right window, because evening watering leaves the blade wet overnight and invites fungus.

Then the two dates that bracket the system. The backflow test in spring, and the blow-out in autumn before the first hard freeze. A missed blow-out is the most expensive routine failure in the whole of grounds care, because the damage is underground and you find it in April.

The septic field under the lawn

Most Cape properties sit on a private septic system under Title 5, and the leach field is usually the flattest, sunniest, most open part of the yard. That is exactly where people want to put a patio, a pool, a shed, a raised bed or a row of trees. Roots find the trenches, and a machine driven across a field can crush a distribution line without anyone hearing it happen.

So before anything is planted, parked or built on that part of a property, we look at the as-built card on file with the Board of Health. Grass over the field is the right answer, and keeping it mown, unshaded and clear of traffic is most of the maintenance. Know where the covers and risers are before you top-dress, and keep the reserve area clear too, because it is the part of the yard with nothing on the ground to mark it and the part a future septic upgrade will need.

Near the water, ask before you dig

Work within a hundred feet of a wetland, marsh, pond or coastal bank goes past the Barnstable Conservation Division, and the definition catches people out. Clearing brush, regrading, cutting a new bed, building a retaining wall or putting in a drive extension can all need a filing, even when the work itself is modest. A homeowner who says they are only putting in a garden is often describing something the town wants to see on paper first.

The filing is not usually the obstacle. The calendar is. Hearings run on a schedule, conditions come attached, and an erosion-control line or a planting plan may be part of the approval. Work that out in the winter and the spring is straightforward.

Arriving to a house that looks lived in

Grass grows whether or not anybody is in the house, and a property that has been left for six weeks announces it. An unmown lawn, a hedge that has broken its line and full gutters read as an empty house from the road, which matters for more reasons than appearance.

For a seasonal property the useful thing to give us is not a schedule, it is your arrival dates. We work backwards from them: the last cut and the edging land the day or two before you come, not the week after, and the beds are turned over before the first weekend rather than during it. If the house is being let, the same logic applies to the changeover days.

The other practical piece is that the grounds and the building are in the same company. When a gutter is overflowing into a flower bed, the bed is a symptom, and the same people who noticed it can look at the gutter.