What's Included In A Commercial Landscaping Contract?

What's Included In A Commercial Landscaping Contract?

Understanding commercial landscaping contracts can be difficult, whether you’re looking for corporate landscaping, HOA landscape maintenance, or apartment landscaping. In fact, that’s why our guide to Landscape Maintenance Pricing is our most popular free resource.

Never ones to shy away from tough questions, we created an outline of all the services that can be potentially included in every contract so that property managers might understand them better.

Size, Scope, and Frequency Before we get into the types of services offered in a commercial landscape maintenance contract, it’s crucial for us to mention the three most important factors that will determine the ultimate price of your bid: property size, project scope, and frequency of service. The size of your landscape is the surface area of all the greenspace on your property. The larger the property, the more your fuel, labor, and material costs will increase.

Unlike some providers of HOA, apartment, or corporate landscaping, the Schill team does not provide maintenance on a per service basis. Instead, we schedule work on a contract basis for the entire landscape maintenance season, which is 38 to 40 weeks long, and our crews can be scheduled to visit your property 28-32 times to mow during that period, with several additional visits scheduled for fertilizer, pruning, and landscape detailing. As you probably guessed, an increase in the frequency of service will lead to an increase in the cost of your landscape maintenance.

The scope of services in your contract is simply an outline of which services your landscape maintenance provider is performing. To make things simple, we’ve broken down these services into the following categories: general seasonal care, irrigation and sprinkler care, plant and horticultural care, and enhancements.

Different Care for Each Season Northeast Ohio is blessed to have four seasons, and each requires a different approach based on how it will affect your landscape.

Some of our clients get the bulk of their care during the spring, whereas others will get more care in the summer and fall. Each property has different needs, and the following is a basic summary of what we do throughout the year.

Late spring is generally when we do the bulk of our annual planting, although fall is another time of year when certain types of flowers bloom and thrive.

Throughout the spring and summer, our crews are out mowing turf about 11,000 times per year as well as fertilizing and detailing landscapes. Throughout the fall we’re busy blowing the leaves that fall from the deciduous trees on our client’s properties, though we do some autumn planting during this time as well.

In winter we focus on snow and ice removal services, and we classify those contracts differently. To learn more about the three main types of commercial snow and ice removal contracts, read our article outlining the differences.

Plant and Horticultural Care Here at Schill, we care about making sure your perennials, flowers, trees, and shrubs look great, but we also want to keep them healthy. For example, we make sure your trees and shrubs look well groomed by pruning them. This could mean trimming them to maintain their growth in the summer or practicing dormant pruning in winter to make sure plants are healthy. In addition to this, we also promote plant health with organic fertilizer and by monitoring for insects and diseases.

Bed Care Typically, any mulching that’s done to flower or plant beds is classified as bed care. This includes everything from the installation of flower beds to maintaining them by adding mulch, etc. We take mulch very seriously here at Schill, as you can see from our comprehensive review of 9 different types of mulch (3 of which we actively use).

And once that mulch is applied, we make sure that as much of it stays in its place as possible by blowing and raking any that gets displaced by wind or foot traffic. In addition to this, bed care also includes the prevention of unwanted plants by weeding.

Fertilizer Application Contrary to popular opinion, plants don’t just need water and sunlight to thrive. There are a host of environmental factors that determine how healthy they will be, and the key to ensuring that health starts with the soil.

Schill Grounds Management uses a hybrid of approach to make sure your flowers, turf, and shrubs are getting the nutrients.

Pest Control No landscape is impervious to pests. As silly as it sounds, it’s easy to forget that your landscape is a part of nature, and that animals and insects will always be a part of that ecosystem. However, Northeast Ohio is home to a variety of insects that can wreak havoc on your trees, shrubs, turf, and flowers.

Just like a few squirrels on your property can be cute while a few hundred is an ecological nightmare, an infestation of pests like grubs or chinch bugs on your lawn, or leaf hopper and aphids on your trees and shrubs should be treated immediately.

The Schill team knows how to spot the differences between bugs that are harmless or even beneficial to your plants, versus insects that feed on and leach nutrients from your trees and shrubs.

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