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Dethatching and Other Fall To-Do Items

Wheelbarrow and Rake for Fall YardworkAutumn leads with an extensive list of exterior property maintenance items with it. To set up your Lakeway rental property’s yard and exterior ready for winter, you may have to look closely at the lawn to figure out whether or not it requires to be dethatched, leaves cleaned up, and trees and plants made ready to weather the cold temperatures.

Tenants do a lot of the cleaning and even some repairs for a rental home. They live in the house so they are the ones first affected by it. This means that they have a big part in taking care of a rental property. However, there are some types of tasks that they shouldn’t attempt to do. These are tasks that either requires technical expertise or tasks that have a large element of risk. For these tasks, tenants are better off not doing them. Therefore, with regards to seasonal yard maintenance, there are few assignments that should not be a tenant’s responsibility. Heedless of whether you need to be sure that the responsibility is accomplished properly, or the job would put your tenant’s safety and security at risk, these forms of maintenance activities are better cared for by those who know how to work on them well and carefully.

A rental property’s lawn is a critical factor of the whole appeal and value of the home. Continual lawn maintenance should be an important consideration for both you and your tenant, as should other seasonal lawn maintenance tasks such as aerating and dethatching. Ultimately, the soil underneath a lawn will become compacted with dead grass and other debris. This collected material is called thatch. While a healthy lawn will benefit from a little bit of organic material, when thatch builds up too much it can prevent water and essential nutrients from penetrating the ground and reaching the roots of your grass. This can trigger the lawn to turn brown and stop growing, quickly ending in landscaping ugliness. But once you remove the thatch, you encourage the grass to thicken up and also make it stronger and less likely to get a disease. Dethatching also increases the amount of water, air, and nutrients that can go through to the root zone of your plants.

There are two ways to address the thatch problem: dethatching or power raking and aerating. For little lawn areas, it is achievable to clear out thatch with a dethatching rake. The tines of the rake are intended to uproot the thatch upward, loosening it and separating it from the soil. To dethatch a lawn by hand, the lawn should be mowed to half of its normal height and then raked thoroughly. The loosened thatch can then be removed with your next mowing. To aerate a small lawn, you can rent an aerator machine that will remove small plugs of soil.

If it follows that you are going to bring about this task yourself, ensure that you clearly mark all sprinkler heads or utility lines for the reason that you don’t run over and damage them. You’ll furthermore have to comply with the guidelines safely to see to it that the aerator doesn’t damage your lawn in the process. There are, additionally, professionals who offer these services that you may desire to consult and discuss with.

By all means, if your rental property has a larger yard, these practices will be unbelievably tedious and drawn-out to perform yourself. You could rent a dethatching or power raking machine to help with that task, but the same with aerating, you’ll have to be wary as to not to damage your irrigation system or other areas of the yard. Lawns that have been aerated or dethatched must additionally be maintained rather carefully from then on, or risk more and more damage. Proper watering and fertilizing are steps that should be taken after a dethatching or aeration, to both protect your lawn and encourage the roots to grow.

Even though your tenant may actually be proficient, it is not a good idea to expect them to perform dethatching or aeration on your property’s lawn. If they don’t do a decent job or don’t know what they are doing, they could possibly cause extensive damage to your rental home’s yard, irrigation system, even septic or other utility lines. The equipment required to perform these maintenance tasks is not something most tenants possess or will have used before, greatly maximizing the chances that something will go wrong and that they could even harm themselves in the process.

Putting your tenant’s safety at risk is on no occasion a good idea, as it could end up with you possibly being held liable for their pain and suffering. You could carry out lawn maintenance on your property yourself but contingent on the size of your rental home’s lawn, you might desire to hire a professional company to get in and work on these important lawn maintenance tasks for you.

In lieu of wasting your time on seasonal maintenance tasks, assess the benefits of working with Real Property Management Longhorn to watch over them for you. As a real estate investor, your time is, in effect, money. Unleash your time by choosing us to manage your rental property for you. Our property maintenance services will see to it that important seasonal tasks are being executed frequently and correctly, keeping your Lakeway rental property in good shape year-round. To find out more, contact us online or call us at 512-580-3099 today.

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