This page outlines our maintenance services and different options that are included in our maintenance service packages. If you’re looking for information on what kind of gardens this can be applied to, are ready to shop for edible gardening products, or want to book a consultation, click on the links below.

Garden maintenance gives you peace of mind that your garden will be tended to in a professional manner. Whatever your gardening goals, we can help maximizing yields, minimizing weeds, reducing damage from harmful insects, and ensuring overall health and vigor of your plants. If your garden is an important investment for you and your family, let us help you keep it in tip-top shape whether it is for the all or part of the gardening season. Our maintenance services are divided into three main categories: General Maintenance, Specialty Maintenance, and Garden Checkups.

Maintenance works best as part of an ongoing strategy. Most tasks such as minimizing weeds, improving your soil, and keeping plants healthy often requires multiple visits for the best long-term benefits. Shorter engagements can be arranged when work or life situations get busy, when you go away on vacation, and when you need an extra hand in the garden. Before starting any work, we’ll listen to your needs and take care of your garden as if it were our own.

General maintenance services can include watering, weeding, and harvesting of the produce (for you and your family). We strongly recommend considering maintenance as part of a full-season gardening strategy as plants often need the full season before being ready for harvest and neglect during the season can diminish yields and reduce quality of produce. Many tasks also require multiple visits for short and long-term benefits to accrue. Here’s what can be included in our general maintenance:

Regular watering, whether with an irrigation system, sprinkler, or manually is critical to a plant’s growth and development. We recommend creating a weekly schedule when the plants get watered. It is important to water thoroughly and deeply, allowing the plants to establish a strong root system.

Weeds are an inevitable part of any garden, blown in from surrounding yards or exposed when preparing the ground for planting. Weeding is especially important early on in the season, minimizing competition for precious water, nutrient, and space resources. Preper weeding improves overall plant growth and yields, provides a nicer looking garden, and easier time with the weeds for the rest of the season.

Many plants, especially perennials need some sort of regular pruning or trimming to remove damaged or diseased areas, improve airflow, and ensure long term health of the plant. For many annuals that get direct seeding, proper thinning minimizes overcrowding, allowing the remaining plants to grow to their full mature size.

Tall plants like indeterminate tomatoes, runner beans, peas and cucumbres do best with additional vertical support and space in which to grow. As the plants get bigger, and produce matures on the vine, additional support ties may be required to ensure the plant is able to properly support full sized fruit like tomatoes, cucumbers, and melons.

Depending on soil conditions and plant selection, some areas of the garden will require supplementary feeding and fertilizing. Choose from organic worm castings, liquid or granular organic fertilizers, or a variety of other nutrient remedies to ensure your plants get the nutrients they need.

Proper timing and harvesting of the vegetables can help ensure they stay as crisp and tender as possible. Some plants like beans and peas produce best when regularly harvested, while others plants like kale and chard are more forgiving when they can be harvesting. We can help ensure your produce gets harvested for you at just the right time.

When it comes to edible gardens, there are a few unique tasks that take more skill, care, and finesse. Like much of our general maintenance, these tasks often require a series of visits to ensure the job gets done properly. For example, some natural pest control remedies require a few sessions to identify the issue, select the appropriate remedy, and subsequent application(s) of an organic pesticide before good results as seen. Here is what can be included in our specialty maintenance:

With pest control, we identify and create a strategy to minimize the population of bad/harmful pests while promoting healthy habitats for beneficial insects. We use only certified organic products that are safe for all humans and pets.

Grow crops almost all year round and extend your fall harvest into November and December, and spring planting outdoors in April. We can setup mini hoop tunnels, row covers, cold frames, and hobby greenhouses to keep the garden producing while most people have turned in for the winter.

We believe that healthy gardens start with healthy soil, and composting is one of the best ways to grow your own soil. That’s why we love restarting a stuck compost bin, get started with composting, improving the efficiency of your composting program, and turning this task into one of most rewarding parts of gardening.

Succession planting ensures that the yields are staggered during the growing season. While it can be great to be overloaded with produce, it is even better if we can enjoy the same amount spread evenly during the season.

Fall is the best time to get your garden ready for next year’s growing season. This is when we have a bit more time to spend in the garden to really tackle important projects like getting the compost ready for winter, spreading finished compost in the beds and preparing perennials for the winter.

In Southern Ontario, garlic typically gets planted in mid-October and put under a thick blanket of straw to protect it over the winter. It is one of the first green things to come up in the spring, a delicious crop to harvest and eat, and a natural pest control plant as well. You can guess it’s one of our favourite plants to grow.

Tending and managing an edible garden can be a challenging task, with an almost endless list of things that can be done in the garden. We’ve learned that being able to identify and prioritize the right tasks at the right time can mean the difference between a good and a great harvest, not only for this year, but for many years to come.

For the DIY gardeners out there, garden checkups provide an opportunity for an additional expert’s perspective of the garden. With familiarity, we can sometimes lose sight of the big picture of the garden and miss subtle issues that can become serious problems if not properly addressed.

For each garden checkup, we can help you become a better gardener by identifying noxious weeds, signs of nutrient deficiencies, indicators of plant stress, personalized feedback on your soil profile and garden ecosystem, and general trends affecting gardeners in the region. Each checkup culminates in a gardening report with action-oriented feedback with areas of improvement prioritized by time and level of importance. Enjoy the freshest herbs and juiciest tomatoes knowing it’s growing in an organic, chemical-free manner.

At our garden checkups, we can help you identify issues before they become too serious. This can include signs of plant stress, indicators or nutrient deficiencies, identify potential weed issues, and more. Being out in the gardens on a regular basis, we know what trends are happening across our region such as increases in certain pests or diseases.

Once we’ve identified certain areas of improvement, we can help you with a checklist of gardening tasks to help you get the most out of your garden. We’ll classify these in order of priority to give you specific action steps to ensure the overall health of your garden.

Ultimately, garden checkups help to give you peace of mind on how well your garden is doing. Just like we get regular checkups at the doctor’s office, we can help give you an assessment on the health of your garden including the soil, the plants, and the surrounding ecosystem.

We recognize that every garden is unique and may require special care and attention. Here are a few examples of some of the garden maintenance work we’ve done in the past.

These are just a few examples of the garden maintenance we can help you with. We recognize each garden and each gardener is unique and we’re happy to help you with an estimate and to ensure your garden gets properly maintained and you can enjoy a productive and bountiful garden.

Garden maintenance can be provided on an ad-hoc, short term basis and also throughout the entire outdoor growing season. No matter the duration, we can tailor each session according to your schedule and needs, such as during a busy period of life, over an extended vacation, or for extra peace of mind that as you learn how to manage the garden yourself.

For full-season maintenance, you can sit back and enjoy the garden while we take care of it for you. We’ll design a program that fits in with your schedule so you can enjoy the freshest veggies right from your yard. The amount of maintenance your garden will require varies based on garden size, garden type (ex. raised beds, containers, or in-ground), types of plants, time of year, tasks required, and soil conditions.

The amount of maintenance your garden will require varies based on garden size, garden type (ex. raised beds, containers, or in-ground), types of plants, and soil conditions. We can help you to design a maintenance plan and to help ensure your garden gets properly maintained, whether it is regular maintenance over the entire growing season, or if you need a temporary helping hand while away on vacation.