FAQ: How can my landscaping company help homeowners obtain a healthier lawn?
Answer: You can promote healthier lawns by adding fall topdressing services to your landscape business.
In this blog post, you’ll learn how to add topdressing to your fall lawn services:
- 8 benefits fall topdressing services provide for your customers
- Ensuring your lawn care customers know about fall topdressing
- Encourage the turf trifecta: Aeration, overseeding, and fall topdressing
- Invest in the must-have lawn care equipment for fall topdressing.
8 Benefits Fall Topdressing Services Provide for Your Customers
Fall topdressing applies to lawns with cool season grasses in the northern part of the U.S. For southern landscapers, you’ll put down topdressing in the spring at the same time as your aeration and overseeding services.
As a landscape professional, you know that fall topdressing offers many benefits to your customers’ cool season lawns. Turf experts recommend using only a ¼” of topdressing on a client’s lawn. But it’s enough to revive turfgrass.
You can use the following seven benefits in your marketing materials to encourage your lawn care clients to buy into fall topdressing services:
- Topdressing contains compost, sand, or topsoil.
- Mix all three materials: Compost, sand, and topsoil, for a fall topdressing powerhouse.
- Customers will need less fertilizer when you apply fall topdressing services on cool season lawns.
- Customers’ lawns will have improved soil aeration, critical to homeowners with all soil types, especially clay soil.
- Homeowners will notice that their soil quality improves with fall topdressing.
- You can educate your customers that fall topdressing adds beneficial soil microbes, aids in seed germination, levels lawns, and breaks down thatch.
- If your customers are eco-conscious, you can sell topdressing services this fall by using vegetative compost mixed with topsoil and sand.
- Explain that your compost is from spent plants, grass clippings, and other vegetative waste.
Learn more: The Best Spreader for Topdressing Golf Greens
Ensuring Your Lawn Care Customers Know About Fall Topdressing
Upselling your lawn care services helps your landscaping business grow. When it comes to seasonal services, like topdressing in the fall, you need to remind your customers in advance that you offer these services.
For example, you want to let your landscaping customers know in August that it’s time to schedule their fall topdressing services unless it’s part of a lawn care program you already offer them.
For example, you may bundle topdressing services with your early fall aerating and overseeding services.
You can learn more about marketing your additional lawn care services, including fall topdressing in these three Spyker blog posts:
- Top 3 Landscape Business Marketing Tips for Your Landscaping Company
- 10 Secrets for Successfully Marketing Your Lawn Care Services for Spring & Summer
- 8 Tips for Marketing & Advertising Your Lawn Care & Landscape Company.
Encourage the Turf Trifecta: Aeration, Overseeding, and Fall Topdressing
Some professional landscapers have found that the turf trifecta, which consists of aeration, overseeding, and fall topdressing, when performed together, brings optimal health to customers’ lawns.
Turf managers recommend aeration first for lawns; then some recommend overseeding and topping it off with topdressing.
However, Level Green Landscaping recommends aeration, topdressing, and overseeding for their commercial clients in the Washington, D.C., area.
In their blog post, Why We Aerate and Compost Lawns Before Overseeding, Level Green Landscaping states that their technicians apply compost after aeration to produce a solid soil foundation.
The blog post says they use vegetative compost that has turned into loamy soil, which you see when you walk in the woods.
Loam is rich in nutrients, dark colored, and presents a nutrient powerhouse to any lawn. Plus, this loamy soil comes from broken-down compost and soil microcosms that provide lawns with
- Slowly releasing nutrients
- Neutralizing acidic and alkaline soils
- Packing macro- and micro-nutrients
- Minimizing soil erosion and water run-off.
Invest in Must-Have Lawn Care Equipment for Fall Topdressing
To properly apply fall topdressing, you’ll need the following equipment:
This spreader helps you apply fall topdressing on customer lawns after aerating.
- A core aerator
A core aerator pulls small plugs of soil from your turfgrass, allowing oxygen, water, and seed to penetrate deep into the soil.
- A lawn leveling rake
This type of rake helps you level the lawn after applying topdressing.
- A shovel
The shovel helps you with spreading topdressing and other materials on lawns.
- A slit seeder or traditional overseeder
The slit seeder deposits turfgrass seed deep into the soil, and a traditional overseeder drops grass seed at aeration holes.
- A wheelbarrow
As you know, a wheelbarrow takes compost and fertilizer to your work site.
Watch more: How the Spyker Accuway Works to Center Your Spread Pattern
Invest in the Best with Spyker Spreaders
Our Spyker Broadcast Spreaders, including our newest Pro-Series SPY200T-1P 200LB Tow Behind Broadcast Spreader, have high-capacity hoppers, one-piece welded, powder-coated frames with metal gears, and lifetime warranties.
Our SPY200T-1P commercial tow spreader uses a high-efficiency, high-capacity hopper. It is designed for use on large lawns, commercial properties, golf courses, and sports fields.
The tires’ large, 15” x 6” turf tread crosses all terrains for a smooth and efficient pull behind any rider-on mower or ZTR. The large-hopper tow spreader is easy to use, productive, and versatile. It gives you the durability to handle all lawn and landscaping jobs season after season.
Our Spyker broadcast spreaders and other landscaping equipment are available at your local dealer, online, or at the Spyker store.
Spyker Customer Service: For warranty, service parts, or help at any time, reach out to our team by filling out our contact form. Replacement parts can also be ordered online at Spyker’s website.
Sources:
GolfCourseLawn.Store, How To Topdress Your Lawn: The Complete Guide.
LevelGreenLandscaping.com, Why We Aerate and Compost Lawns Before Overseeding.
LawnLove.com, Topdressing a Lawn: How to Do It and Its Benefits.
TheLawnForum.com, What Is the Proper Sequence? (Discussion 39667).
