As you all know Mother’s Day is this Sunday!  We all know that Mom’s LOVE flowers, plants, and anything that is going to make life more BEAUTIFUL.   So why not give her a gift that will keep on giving year after year?  This is the last Saturday that our nursery will be open to the public, and since it is Mother’s Day Weekend EVERYTHING is 30% OFF!!!

So PLEASE come visit us this Saturday starting at 8:30 am till 2:00 pm,  and get your mother something that she will be able to enjoy year after year!

True North Landscaping Lucas Oil Show 2011

From the Landscaper – This will be a very short TNTimes.  Wanted to share a couple photos of our Lucas Show display that we built, and say THANK YOU to those of you who dropped by to show your support and say hi.  Come see us at the Flower and Patio Show, booth #118!

I have a request (ie. WE NEED HELP)! We have set up a very SWEET 10×10 garden at the Flower & Patio Show, which runs at the Fairgrounds beginning March 12-March 20.  Our booth is complete w/landscaping, stone steps, wall, tumbled flagstone hardscape, bubblers and waterfall (yes, it’s all in a 10×10′).  I’m looking for 4 or 5 TNL friends to help us run our booth.  Shifts are 10AM-3PM, and 4PM-9PM.  For you to qualify, you need to be the following:

1 – You must LOVE TNL!

2 – You must not be afraid to smile and talk to people (you don’t need to be a genius, just hand out brochures and I will do some simple ‘coaching’ on what to say for any of the more technical questions people may have.  Remember, a great default answer/option is ‘I don’t know’).

3 – You must be able to run 1 or 2 shifts.

4 – You must be REALLY good looking…or bald like me. (I’m just kidding!!!  Except for the bald like me part. ).

What will you get out of this?

1 – Our unwavering appreciation.

2 – A free way to ‘get in’ to the show, along w/2 complimentary tickets to get you and a guest in at your leisure, or that you can give to whomever.

CAN YOU HELP???  If so, please call our office or better yet, shoot an e-mail.  THANK YOU!

In other news… Spring has almost sprung.  Our team’s stronger then ever, we’re getting ready to begin fertilizing, mulching, renovations, landscaping, you name it!  We will ALSO be carrying a larger variety and quantities of trees, shrubs, and perennials this year then ever before.  More to come on this in our next newsletter, but from early April-Mid May, we will be open every Saturday at our location just East of downtown off of I-70, with some TREE-MENDOUS deals on plants, bagged and bulk mulch, flowers, perennials, and some other gardening/landscaping items as well.  We also now accept Visa and MasterCard, so put it on your calendar to come see us this spring.  Pick it up here, or have us deliver and plant for you!  Remember, we want to be your ‘Unique, year round Landscape and Grounds Maintenance Solution’.  Thank you for reading, we appreciate your business very much.

Bubbling Rock

Enjoying The Pondless Stream!

True North Landscaping

TRADE-SHOWS!

LUCAS OIL – Come see us THIS WEEKEND at the Lucas Oil Home and Flower Show!  It’s in its 2^ndyear, and is a really great show in a spectacular venue.  We have once again built a really cool pondless waterfall feature with a bubbling rock, similar to last year, but ‘bigger and badder’!  We are set up at the North end of the stadium at the Leveridge Landscaping booth.  Leveridge specializes in very cool, both small and large scale hardscape and retention wall projects.  Come check out this great show this weekend, I’ll be at the booth all of Saturday afternoon.

FLOWER AND PATIO – They twisted our arm into doing a booth this year, so come see us at booth #118 near the food concession at the Fairgrounds.  We will have a 10′x10′ booth w/some hardscaping and several smaller water features and plantings.  It will be small but COOL!  It will be a LONG show, so PLEASE come and say hi, March 11-20.  Every day (OK, at least once?).

From The Landscaper

Hello friends, I’d like to take this opportunity to officially tell winter to ‘Go Away’ and welcome spring.  Do you agree?  We sure had a winter.  I’d like to recap what has occurred over this past calendar year with weather, it’s been very unique and has created some serious challenges.  I was at an Indiana State Chemist training last week in Seymour Indiana.  The consensus was that this is the most stressed anyone has ever seen plant material and turf going into a spring.  One old timer (he’s been at it since almost before I was born) said, ‘I thought that if I survived the summer of 1988, nothing could compare, but this is much worse’.  Here’s what’s happened.  We had a very wet spring through June.  Surface roots were always being fed, and nothing had to ‘work’ for water or ‘dig deep’.  Then, the faucet was ‘shut off’.  We missed several critical rains, and essentially had no measureable rainfall until Thanksgiving.  Overall, this was the longest dry spell combined with heat that Indiana has experienced since 1896!  Around August we began noticing some evergreens starting to brown.  By October, the extent of the damage was becoming more evident.  Particularly affected were Arborvitae, Yews, Spruce, Hemlock, and lawns.  And there are a lot more surprises yet to come.  From the rain at Thanksgiving, we basically went straight into winter, a long, full out winter.  Plants and turf had no recovery time, thus going into winter stressed.  Going into winter, the water table was 19″ low, after the winter we just had we’re back to par.  December was the 3^rd overall snowiest since 1896!  We never had any truly ‘big’ snows, just lots of it.  So what is ‘normal’, and what should we expect this spring?  One thing for sure, unless you had irrigation or were able to aggressively and deeply water, there are a lot of lawns to renovate this March-April and a lot of plant material that needs replacing.  Keep reading for some tips on what we can do about it!

Lawn, Tree, and Shrub Care – What do we do now?

TURF – If your turf is patchy, thin, or just plain dead, here’s the approach we plan on taking and that I would recommend for our 5 step Turf Fertilization program.  

STEP 1 – Heavy aeration/over seeding OR slit seeding (a machine with knives that ‘drops’ seed into the cuts).  This ideally will occur in March, and include starter fertilizer.

STEP 2 – Fertilizer w/ Pre-Emergent.  This can’t occur to soon, as new seed needs to germinate and get a min. of 4 weeks of growth.  This puts us at a window of somewhere around late April/early May.  You will likely experience crabgrass, which can’t be helped.  Last years heat and creation of patchy, dead spots is the perfect recipe for crabgrass.  We actually lost clients last year that complained of not controlling the crabgrass, but then gained clients who said their previous company couldn’t control the crabgrass, and could we help!?!?!  ANYWAYS…

STEP 3/4 – Mid summer and late summer/early fall fertilizer and weed control application.

STEP 5 – Winterizer fertilization only.  This is a program we’ve had good results with and that we promote.  We’d be happy to include you on our schedule!

TREES/SHRUBS – How to determine if your trees or shrubs are dead?  Sometimes it’s very obvious, other times it’s not.  If you have Spruce or other evergreens (conifers) and they are totally brown or have dropped their needles… THEY’RE DEAD!

If you have deciduous shrubs or trees that didn’t drop their leaves and were looking a little ‘pekid’ going into fall, there’s a couple things you can do.  Bend some of the branches.  If they snap or break, and if this is consistently happening in several different spots on the plant, it’s likely dead.  You can also scratch the trunk and bark in various places with your thumbnail or a knife.  If it’s not tender green, but hard and brown, then bad news, you’ve got a dead plant!  Then you will have a difficult decision to make.  Remove, then ‘to replace or not to replace???  We can help!  We plant trees and shrubs almost all year long, and we also have a small nursery in April-May with GREAT prices.  So let us know!

Every year I get very reflective around Christmas time. This year has seemed especially busy, its felt non-stop since March. I’ve been longing to take my foot off the accelerator and just slow WAY down for a couple weeks to enjoy my wife and kids, family, friends, quiet, a few good books…

One evening many years ago, I was trout fishing a small lake up in Canada, a few weeks after ice-out. I was miles from anything, and the water was cold. It was an amazingly still and beautiful night, sunset, loons were calling, fish were jumping, my faithful springer spaniel, Kelsey, was with me. It was perfect. But the boat sank, and I nearly drown. This is the short version, but when I crawled onto the shore, alone in the dark, with one sock, underwear, and a t-shirt on, guess what? I didn’t care AT ALL about the $1,000+ of fishing tackle I had just lost, the clothes, my wallet… all that mattered were the visions and memories that were literally exploding in my head of the people in my life, and I was also very aware of my breathing. It was crystal clear to me, ‘This is all that matters, these eternal things…’ Those eternal relationships, PEOPLE, ‘others’, and the gift of life, not ‘stuff’…

Why do I share this story? Well, Christmas is, among other things, a time of giving and receiving gifts. In reflecting on all the good gifts and people in my life, I simply want to say ‘Thank You’. You’re the people who allow me to make a living for my family, to create jobs for 8-10 other hard working folks, to create beautiful landscapes in your yards. My crew and I ‘get to’ be a part of creating and/or maintaining your landscapes. 95 degree weather or 12 hour days aside, this is a gift! You trust us enough to allow is into your homes, your yards, your lives, your ‘e-mail In Box’ with this newsletter. THANK YOU! 2010 was a great year for True North, and it’s all possible thanks to you, our friends and clients.

Please accept my heartfelt ‘THANK YOU’ for everything. May hope, peace, joy, and all good things be yours. From all of us at True North… MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Rain? What rain? What IS rain? That sums it up. A very wet spring, followed by the longest dry spell since weather recording began in Indiana back in the late 1800′s. What does this mean? Plant material and turf grass is amazingly resilient. Unfortunately, there is a lot of stressed or dead trees, shrubs, and lawns out there. We missed at least 4 CRITICAL rainfalls that it looked like we’d get… but didn’t. Unless people have taken an aggressive approach with watering from July through now… well, there’s going to be a lot of sad surprises come spring, as everything is going into winter weak and stressed. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news!!! If you are the recipient of such bad news, we will likely be doing a lot of turf renovation in March and April, either re-sodding or slit-seeding, which is a good alternative to sod if budget is an issue.

In other news, we’re busy with final landscape projects until the ground is too frozen to work (yes, you CAN install plant material now, in fact, it’s a GREAT time), cleaning up leaves, shutting down water features (on this note, please visit our website at www.truenorthlandscaping.com, go to the Services tab, & click on Water Feature Maintenance to view several videos we recently added to assist and educate our clients), and getting ready for the snow to fly! CALL US if you have any final projects! We want and appreciate the work! Speaking of snow flying…