As you’re grabbing your favorite sweater for a trip to the pumpkin patch, your landscape is sending you a subtle message: "We’re hungry."
It might sound strange, but your trees and shrubs need a final nutrient boost before winter sets in. Even after a long Idaho summer, your plants require deep-root fertilization to survive the coming frost and thrive next spring.
They’re a bit like teenagers—they never truly stop eating.
For homeowners in Idaho Falls and the Snake River Valley, the best time for deep-root fertilization is late fall (September through early November). While the growing season is winding down, the root systems remain active, absorbing essential nutrients to build winter hardiness.
Here is why fall fertilization is the most important service for your Idaho landscape:
Your trees and shrubs usually soak up fertilizer and use it to put out new leaf growth.
But in the fall, their roots take those nutrients and use them to boost their health.
And those roots are really important, absorbing the water and nutrients your trees and shrubs need to thrive.
If you could see through the ground, you’d be amazed. There are thousands of roots down there, stretching out even farther than your tree’s canopy.
That’s a lot of roots to feed.
In the woods, leaves and woody debris stay on the forest floor, decomposing and providing rich, tasty fertilizer for all those lucky trees.
But here in lawn land, we rake those natural nutrients up and haul them away.
Meanwhile, your greedy lawn is a serious competitor, gobbling up nutrients that your trees and shrubs need, too.
Give them their own fall tree and shrub fertilizer to level the field.
Summer is tough on your trees and shrubs. All that growing takes a lot out of them.
They’ve been busy providing shade, being home to birds and squirrels, and producing berries for birds.
Kind of makes you feel like a slacker in comparison, right?
All that hard work uses up a lot of nutrients. Fall tree and shrub fertilizer replaces them.
This is especially important for trees in the landscape. Outside their natural, wooded settings, most landscape trees struggle to acquire the nutrients and protection they would otherwise have, not to mention the added stresses of wind, lawn equipment and other non-natural factors.
Keeping them healthy through fall fertilization is a great way to guard against the problems that can arise in landscaped areas.
Speaking of hard work, imagine completely changing your color every fall.
If you love those vibrant golden, orange, and crimson leaves, make sure your trees and shrubs are healthy enough to produce them.
When a tree doesn’t have enough nutrients, you can see it in weak, dying leaves — even before they have a chance to turn color and drift to the ground naturally.
If you notice yellowing leaves long before the fall color change, that’s a sign your tree is struggling and needs a nutrient boost.
Fall tree and shrub fertilizer delivers a long-lasting meal.
You want your trees and shrubs to stick around, right?
When your trees and shrubs struggle to get the important nutrients they need, they get weak. That makes them more susceptible to damaging insects and diseases.
You don’t want to lose your spruce, aspen, or Prairiefire crabapple, do you?
Struggling trees and shrubs won’t grow as tall or as full as they could, either.
Don’t wait for problems to set in. Then, it could be too late.
Fertilizing your trees and shrubs in fall is a lot easier — and cheaper — than replacing them.
We know you’ve barely slurped your first sip of pumpkin spice latte, and here we are asking you to think about spring. We’re monsters.
But fall tree and shrub fertilizer is as much about spring as it is about fall.
They store this fall feeding in their roots, so the nutrients are available in the spring for important new growth.
The pumpkin patch can wait.
Fertilize your trees and shrubs in the fall to get them through the winter and emerge vibrant and ready to grow in the spring.
No time to fuss with all that? We don’t blame you. There’s a lot of pumpkin spice stuff out there to sample.
Lawn Buddies offers tree and shrub fertilization year-round with granular fertilizer and liquid deep-root tree fertilizer in spring and fall.
Both services are available for our Idaho Falls customers who use our full-service lawn care program.
That gives you extra peace of mind — choose an Idaho Falls plant health care service that bundles your yard’s most-needed treatments into one convenient, no-fuss plan, plus know your valuable trees and shrubs are getting the nourishing nutrients they need to thrive.
Got a few minutes? That’s all you need to get started. Just fill out the form on this page, call us at (208) 656-9131 or read more about our services. Then you can kick back and relax in your healthy, thriving landscape.
Image sources: tree roots, rake