Seasonal Services or a Maintenance Contract?

Every Friday at eight, the lawn service pulls up. By half past, the grass is mowed, the edges along the driveway are crisp and the clippings are blown off the walk. They’ve come every Friday for four years. You like them.

It’s late October now, and the lawn is the only part of the yard that looks looked after. Leaves have drifted against the back fence and into the beds. The laurel along the side yard is a foot past the path. The perennials by the porch went brown in September and nobody cut them back. None of that is the lawn service’s fault; it isn’t what you hired them for. So do you replace them, or find someone for everything else?

It depends on how much of your yard is lawn, and how happy you are with the people who mow it. If it’s mostly lawn and your lawn service suits you, keep them and hire a company for the seasonal work; if it’s a planted garden, landscape maintenance covers the seasonal tasks as part of regular care.

Lawn care and landscape maintenance are different levels of service. Lawn care looks after the grass: mowing, edging, blowing. Landscape maintenance looks after the whole yard, which means beds, pruning, irrigation and the seasonal work each part of the garden needs. For how the two compare task by task, see lawn care, landscape maintenance or estate gardening.

Here’s a simple way to tell which one your yard is. Picture a normal month in your garden. If almost everything that needs doing is on the lawn, you’re in the lawn care tier, and a good lawn service plus a few seasonal visits a year is a sensible setup. If most of what needs doing is in the beds, around the shrubs and under the trees, the seasonal work isn’t occasional anymore. It’s most of the work.

The Friday lawn service sits right on that line. The lawn gets what it needs. Everything around it gets what’s left over, which in late October is not much.

There’s always seasonal work, even in a yard that’s mostly lawn. Leaves come down in fall and land in the beds. Shrubs need pruning in their season. Beds collect weeds and spent perennials over a summer. None of it is weekly, and most lawn services don’t do it.

On our side, that work is an Enhancement: quoted on its own and available without a contract in our full-service cities. That covers fall cleanups, mulching and specialty pruning for small trees, large shrubs and shrubs that need restructuring. Every enhancement is quoted in writing before any work starts.

One part of the seasonal list works differently. Aeration and overseeding are part of what we offer our maintenance clients. Dethatching is the same. If your lawn service already aerates, that part of the year may be covered where you are.

It’s also worth knowing what seasonal work doesn’t include with us. Gutter cleaning is not a service we offer, so if your fall list includes the gutters, that’s a separate call.

For the yard with the Friday lawn service, the list is short and specific: the leaves out of the beds and off the fence line, the laurel cut back off the path, the perennials cut down. A few visits a year, not one every week.

If you want to keep your lawn service, the hard part isn’t deciding what the seasonal work is. It’s finding someone to do it. Few landscape maintenance companies have room for one-off seasonal jobs, because their own maintenance clients fill their schedules, so the companies that do take this work are fewer than you’d expect, and they book up quickly.

That’s why the timing matters. The week the leaves are all down is the week everyone with a yard like yours starts calling. Plan the seasonal work ahead instead, and ask to be put on the schedule before the season arrives rather than once it’s underway.

We do take on seasonal work without a contract. Fall cleanups, pruning and other seasonal work are available without a maintenance contract anywhere we offer full service. That means Kirkland, Woodinville, Redmond, Bellevue, Edmonds and the cities around them. Outside those cities, we’re not the right call for seasonal visits.

If you’ve already had one summer get away from you, a bed reset is the seasonal job that brings the beds back to a clean start; see what a reset involves for overgrown beds.

The alternative is to stop splitting the work. With landscape maintenance, the seasonal tasks arrive on regular visits instead of as separate jobs you have to remember and book.

Leaf cleanup, irrigation winterization and fertilization come with the maintenance program; you won’t see them as extras. The rest of the year follows the same routine: mow and edge the lawns, weed and tidy the beds, do the seasonal task that’s due, then rake and blow before leaving. Pruning in winter. Fertilizer and weed control in spring. Keeping up with peak growth in summer. Leaves in fall.

What stays outside the program is written down. Your maintenance scope is written down, and anything outside it is quoted separately as an enhancement. Mulching and specialty pruning, for example, are still Enhancements, quoted when they’re due.

Then there’s the bill. Seasonal work booked one job at a time costs more than the same work done as part of a maintenance program, and it doesn’t arrive evenly: a large invoice after the fall cleanup, another after winter pruning, then nothing for months. That makes household cash flow lumpy. We estimate the work your garden will need across the whole year and spread it over 12 equal payments, even though the work itself varies from month to month. November, with the leaves, costs you the same as July.

It’s more than a mostly-lawn yard needs. For a yard where the beds and shrubs are most of the work, it’s the difference between booking the fall and not having to think about it. Maintenance starts with a visit to your property and a written proposal, so you see exactly what care you’re getting before it begins.

One way: the lawn service still comes every Friday at eight. In early November, a second crew arrives for the day you booked before the leaves came down, and a bill follows that’s bigger than a month of mowing. The beds are cleared, the laurel is off the path, the perennials are cut back, and the lawn crew keeps doing what it’s good at.

The other way: one crew, every visit, and the leaves are part of the routine. Nobody had to remember to call, and November’s payment is the same as every other month’s.

Both are reasonable. The lawn decides which one your yard needs. See what seasonal work we offer on our landscape enhancements page, or how the full program works on our landscape maintenance page.