It’s time to call the landscaping professionals

Do you own or manage a commercial property in Connecticut’s Fairfield or New Haven County? Then now is the time to make provisions for your landscape and its maintenance through the winter months. Failure to take the appropriate steps now could mean your landscape won’t make it through the cold and snow as well as it could. That could mean additional costs in the spring to get your landscape looking its best.

Maintenance Matters

Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields provides a full range of services for landscaping and property care. Our year-round commercial property maintenance plans include the following services:

If you call on the professionals at Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields, we’ll make sure your property is ready to face the winter and come out looking its best by springtime.

Just because the weather is cooling down, doesn’t mean your landscape doesn’t still need a lot of TLC. Here are some of the things your landscape needs now to be prepared for the winter months:

Aerate: Aerate your soil so that water, oxygen, and fertilizer will more easily reach the roots. Aerating your soil will also help to prevent it from becoming too compacted, especially under a heavy coating of snow and thereby prevent avoidable damage.

Planting: Now is the ideal time to plant cool season grasses. Ideally, you want your grass seeded about 45 days before the first frost. The present conditions are ideal for quick germination. Now is also a wonderful time to start planting shrubs and perennials.

Leaf Removal: Falling leaves might be a beautiful part of autumn, but you don’t want them covering your grass. Dead leaves block the sunlight and prevent your grass from thriving.

Trim: During the late fall months, the grass should be cut shorter than usual to permit more sunlight to reach the grass during the winter months. This will further help protect the grass from damage due to frost or snow.

Tree Fertilization: If you want your trees looking their best come springtime, they need to be fertilized now. This will improve their resistance to insects and diseases through the winter months and beyond.

Sprinklers: Any water left in your sprinkler system is likely to freeze during the winter and can cause the pipes to burst. That’s an expensive problem you don’t want on your hands. Avoid this by having your sprinklers blown out to remove every drop of water.

Perennial Care: Perennials don’t tend to thrive during the winter. Once the first frost hits, they cease looking their best, especially if they fall victim to pests or disease. That’s why now is a good time to cut them back. They’ll grow back healthier come springtime.

Let us take care of it

When you sign up for one of our maintenance plans, we’ll make sure your Connecticut property is healthy and always looks clean and well maintained. Our services are ideal for businesses of all sizes as well as commercial properties and community associations.

Diamond Landscapes and Athletic Fields proudly serves our residential and commercial customers in Fairfield County and New Haven County in Connecticut.

Contact us today for a free consultation. We’ll survey your property and come up with the best plan to suit the needs of your site.

Hire a landscape professional for your field’s maintenance

First and foremost, athletic fields need to be safe and functional. However, you also want your athletic facilities to make a good impression so that your athletes can take pride in where they practice and compete. Now, more than ever, events are happening outdoors. You want your athletic field to be able to handle the additional traffic it’s had to endure and still serve your community to the fullest.

Professional maintenance is important for athletic fields

Without maintenance provided by landscape professionals, any athletic field can quickly become dilapidated, unsafe, and more expensive. Here are some reasons to make sure your athletic field gets regular attention from a landscape professional.

  1. Safety: A properly maintained athletic field is a safer athletic field. Reduce unnecessary injury to your athletes by seeing that your athletic field receives regular maintenance. At Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields, we’ll give your field all the time and attention it needs to be the safest playing surface possible.
  2. Longevity: Regular maintenance will increase the longevity of your field because it will experience less wear and tear without repair. A landscape professional will ensure that your field is healthy and beautiful and used optimally.
  3. Savings: When your athletic field is well-maintained, it’s healthier and stronger. Your landscape professional will reduce the likelihood of your field becoming subject to insect infestations, invasive weed growth, and poor irrigation leading to brown patches. That all translates into less in overall yearly maintenance costs.

Since 1987, Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields has provided our Connecticut customers with a full range of services for landscaping and property care. From design to construction to restoration and maintenance, we’re a team you can count on. If you want your athletic field to be a winner, call on the experts at Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields. We’ll work within your budget to make sure your field is safe, durable, and beautiful.

Contact Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields today to get your athletic field looking its best. We’ll take care of your property like it’s our own.

How long should an athletic field rest?

Beautiful athletic fields don’t just happen, especially in a place like Connecticut where wear and tear and weather are all in play. It takes a qualified team of professionals to keep athletic fields looking their best. Whether you need a field designed, restored, or maintained, Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields is up to the job.

Athletic Fields are a specialty at Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields. We offer comprehensive seasonal maintenance, field renovation, mound and base installation, and field lining. Our goal is to make sure your field performs for you and your teams. We focus specifically on wear tolerance and stability.

Field maintenance matters

Keeping your athletic field in good shape is about more than just looks. It’s also about safety. A damaged field makes injuries more likely. Maintenance is especially important if your field serves multiple teams, sports, or levels of play.

Give it a rest

Ideally, you want your field to have 100% coverage and grass that is no less than four months old. Unfortunately, that’s not always possible. But having professionals taking care of your athletic field can make a big difference. If heavy use or extreme weather has left your field damaged, Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields can have it in prime condition in record time.

What else can you do to get more longevity out of your field? Don’t overuse it. You’ll want to keep traffic off heavily used areas by rotating or shifting the field. For example, on a soccer or football field, you can use portable goals and goal posts. For any sport, have teams utilize different spots on the field each practice so no one section sees all the action. Whenever possible, schedule a rest for your field so that any damaged areas can be repaired and the grass can recover.

Since 1987, Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields has been working to make the earth beautiful one Connecticut property at a time. If you want your athletic field to be a winner, leave it to the experts at Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields. We’ll work within your budget to give you safety, durability, and beauty.

Contact us today for a free consultation and price quote. No job is too big or two small for our team. We’ll take care of your property like it’s our own.

Labor Day is just around the corner, which means that fall won’t be far behind (believe it or not). Once we head into September, it will be time to think about one of the most important late summer / early autumn tasks you have for your commercial property: pruning.

Pruning may not seem like a priority when it comes to managing the aesthetics of your commercial landscape, which is why owners and managers often put it off or skip it altogether. Another reason that pruning gets the short end of the stick? People don’t know how to do it right, so they avoid doing it at all – or they do it excessively, which can be even worse.

Whatever the reason, pruning is often neglected on commercial properties – and the result is unhealthy trees, shrubs, hedges, and bushes that can wreck the curb appeal of your property and even pose safety risks to your customers and passers-by.

Four Reasons to Prune on Your Property

Pruning for commercial property should be performed for a number of reasons, including:

Why Hire a Pruning Pro?

It should be pretty clear by now why pruning is so important for your commercial property. But how do you actually do it?

When it comes to pruning your property right, the devil is in the details – how much to trim, which trees and plants require more aggressive pruning and which need a gentler touch, how to handle young vs. old plantings, how to deal with a blocked power line, and dozens of other issues need to be considered and handled.

For all these reasons and more, pruning on your commercial property is a job best left to professionals who understand how to handle any problem, and have the sharp, well-maintained tools and training to do the job right.

You’ll get all of that and more when you hire Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields.

Pruning is a key step on the road to a healthy commercial landscape – let the pros at Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields take that step with you! Contact us today to learn more.

It’s been a rainy summer so far here in Connecticut, leaving many groundskeepers battling wet fields.

What should you do to keep your fields dry and get them playable as quickly as possible? Try these six tips.

  1. Keep your lips clean – Soil and topdressing materials can build up at turfside edges, creating a hazard for players. Built-up lips will drastically affect the drainage of water off of your infield skin, so be sure to clean them out regularly.
  2. Level the playing field – Keep the surface of the infield skin as smooth and level as possible during the season, and consider re-leveling during the fall. This will help support efficient drainage.
  3. Leave healing scars – Go out to the field right after a rain and, using a rake, carve the outline of each puddle. When dry, aggressively scarify your infield with a nail drag, then use the loose infield soil to fill these low areas to help the water move off the infield more effectively.
  4. Avoid working on a damp field in spring – During the spring, wait until the field has lost its frost before working on the infield skin; if it’s too soft to walk on, don’t work there. As soon as it’s dry enough, roll the field early with a one- to three-ton roller so water will run off the field more easily. Roll the turf in an X pattern to ensure lumps and bumps are flattened. 
  5. Dry, dry again – Keep infield dirt and drying agents on hand for emergencies. If puddles are too deep to use drying agents, use puddle sponges or a puddle pump to remove excess water first.
  6. Skip the brooms! – Never use brooms to sweep excess water off your infield soil – it will worsen the surface grade by sweeping away soil, creating an even deeper hole for standing water and further building up infield lips. Use brooms and squeegees for the turf grass only.

The offseason is approaching for many summer sports fields – are you ready with a plan for offseason maintenance? Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields can help. From field design and renovation to year-round maintenance, we’ll help keep your field the best it can be. Contact us today to learn more athletic field maintenance in CT!

It’s About Much More Than Spraying

You’ve probably seen your share of pest control trucks rolling up to commercial properties, claiming they can tame unwanted visitors by spraying your property. But there’ a wide gulf between spraying a lawn and caring for it properly to eradicate and prevent the harmful infestations that can sabotage your commercial lawn.

Let’s take a look at the difference.

Spraying Vs. Proper Commercial Lawn Care

The spray used during a typical lawn spray application is usually an insecticide used to control common pests like ants, fleas, ticks, and flying insects that breed in your lawn. Mosquitos, midges, sand flies, and similar pests are also common targets.

Proper lawn care, on the other hand, integrates an approach to controlling lawn-damaging pests within the context of maintaining a perennially healthy lawn. The most common targets of pest control within a proper lawn care framework include grubs, chinch bugs and mole crickets. Lawn care typically uses a combination of chemicals, plus other strategies aimed at reducing the likelihood of their propagation.

Lawn Care: A Licensed Specialty

In most states, including Connecticut, pest control companies can be certified in two areas: one certification covers general household pests, the other covers lawn and ornamental pests. The latter requires more extensive training, additional certifications, and several types of insurance – along with the equipment needed to safely apply the products to your property.

Life-Cycle Treatments

Another distinguishing characteristic of proper lawn care is that it is a continuous process that begins with proper diagnosis and continues from season to season and year to year. That process could include everything from applying pre-and post-emergent herbicides and assessing environmental stresses to controlling lawn diseases and conducting seasonal soil tests.

A licensed technician must not only be able to identify the pest source of damage to lawns, trees, shrubs, plants, and palms, but also how to properly treat weeds and fungi and address nutritional deficiencies that can affect a tree’s crown, trunk and roots.

Summing Up

Like anything else in life, when it comes to proper care for your commercial lawn, you get what you pay for. If you’ve invested in making your commercial property look as beautiful as it should be, be sure to keep it protected from pests with proper lawn care from a licensed pro!

For commercial lawn care in Connecticut, trust the pros at Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields. We offer landscape solutions that range from planting bed installations and seasonal cleanups to pest control and flower rotations. To learn more, contact us today!

As summer approaches and hot and dry weather begins, it becomes the prime season for an invasion of crabgrass – an ugly, opportunistic weed that will try its best to get a foothold on your commercial landscape.

If you’re a commercial property manager, now is the time to make sure the right preventative measures have been taken to keep crabgrass from ruining all your hard work to upgrade the curb appeal of your property.

Steps To Avoiding Crabgrass

Because crabgrass grows faster during the summer months, remember to take the following preventative actions before the real heat arrives:

Now is the time to control crabgrass on your commercial lawn. If it has already taken hold, you’ll need a different strategy to manage the problem – and that strategy starts with picking up the phone and calling the pros at Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields! Contact us today to learn more about commercial landscaping services in Connecticut.

For many years, baseball groundskeepers have leveled (or “graded”) their playing fields manually to ensure a safe, true field and to allow for effective water drainage.

While manually tackling this task is possible, it’s a slow and labor-intensive process that requires lots of experience and expertise to pull off. On an athletic field, grading entails creating extremely subtle elevation changes from high points to low points – as little as a one percent slope for a natural grass field, for example.

The good news is that technology has simplified this process significantly in recent years – particularly with the advent of laser grading.

How Laser Grading Works

With laser grading, a precision leveling blade smooths materials and surfaces to create the desired slope to your field (it’s important to note that annual athletic field maintenance – laser topdressing – is needed to re-establish the proper grade of your field).

Here’s how the laser grading process works:

Key Benefits Of Laser Grading Your Fields

Laser grading provides great benefits for your athletic fields, where conditions can affect game outcomes, safety, and more.

Key benefits of athletic field Laser Grading include:

Laser Grading For Field Construction And Field Maintenence

Laser grading is recommended for all phases of athletic field construction – from subgrade and gravel to root zone materials – to create a uniform field profile. This will ensure that the field has the least amount of slope needed to remove surface water without affecting play.

To perform laser grading on an existing athletic field, the surface contours of the field must be studied in detail first to understand how water moves, how the field currently slopes, and how to develop an effective athletic field grading plan. Once these benchmarks are established, crews can tow a laser-guided box blade over the field, cutting high spots and filling depressions until the field exactly conforms to the desired slope tolerances.

Looking for laser grading services for your ball field? Contact Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields today to learn more about Laser Grading and athletic field maintenance in Connecticut today!

As we transition to the start of spring here in Connecticut, a big task that many maintenance teams have is making sure that their athletic fields are ready for the start of baseball and softball season.

Not sure what needs to be done? Here is a simple checklist of ten key spring athletic field tasks to help get started. For more details, contact us – we’ll help you get the season off on the right foot!

  1. Mow the turf areas – Every field looks (and grows!) better after it has been mowed.
  2. Remove weeds – Pay particular attention to the skinned areas and infield edge.
  3. Check fences for safety hazards – Check backstops, outfield, and dugout fences to make sure they are in good shape and safe for players to be around.
  4. Take care of critters – No one wants to run through ant mounds! Treat any problem areas and make sure they don’t come back.
  5. Treat the pitcher’s mound and batter’s box areas – These two areas get the most abuse. Fill in any with clay and put dirt on top – this will help provide stability in these areas throughout the season.
  6. Over-seed and top-dress – Test your soil to determine the best way to approach these important tasks. Topdressing application typically consists of a mixture of sand and compost. Once the top dress is in place, the field should be over-seeded, especially in worn areas.
  7. Fertilize – The nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium in fertilizer stimulate new growth and increase the turf’s resiliency.
  8. Work on dirt areas – Fill in any low spots in the dirt and remove any weeds that may have come up.
  9. Draft a fertilizer and water schedule for the season – Plan ahead to ensure green grass all season long.
  10. Create and refine your year-round maintenance schedule – Staying on top of in-season and off-season tasks will help keep your fields in great shape year after year, season after season.

Does your athletic field need a little springtime TLC? We can help! Contact the pros at Diamond Landscapes & Athletic Fields today to learn more: (203) 628-4377.

Maintaining a commercial property can be expensive, and with most of us keeping a close eye on what we spend this year, it’s a good idea to leave no stone unturned (pardon the pun) when it comes to sensible cost management for your commercial landscape.

The question is how do you lower maintenance costs without sacrificing curb appeal for your property and creating a less-than-ideal impression of your company?

Save Money On Property Maintenance

Here are five possible ways to do it.

  1. Keep your landscape design simple. If you’re starting your landscape design from scratch – or attempting a significant re-design – pay particular attention to the ongoing cost of maintaining your property. With many landscape contractors, this is a factor that takes a backseat to curb appeal, if it’s addressed at all. Keep your designs simple, timeless, and easily updatable to decrease future maintenance costs.
  2. Mulch your landscape beds. Mulching landscape beds saves on water use and lowers the costs of plant replacement. A freshly mulched site also looks great. If budget is an issue, consider applying mulch to the front of your building and the common areas only, rather than applying it throughout the property.
  3. Choose your plants carefully. The choice of plants you make can have a big impact on your long-term business landscaping costs. Opt for native plants that grow naturally in your business location to reduce the amount of care, maintenance, and product you will need to keep your plants alive and healthy. Also, consider decreasing plant spacing and size, since smaller plants usually cost less.
  4. Invest in maintenance. Emergency maintenance is much more expensive than preventing commercial landscape problems in the first place. Regular maintenance will also reduce the likelihood of damage due to severe weather, and can reduce the likelihood of a costly personal injury claim.
  5. Consider artificial grass. While nothing beats the beautiful look of a manicured lawn, artificial grass can work in many settings – especially on smaller properties. Artificial grass eliminates the cost of mowing, fertilizing and weeding.

Need comprehensive commercial property design and maintenance services in Connecticut? We can handle it. Contact Diamond Landscapes and Athletic Fields today to learn more!