After a summer of working in your yard to keep your lawn green and manicured, your flowers blooming, and your trees trimmed, it is time to begin preparing your home and yard for the cool weather of fall. Here are some recommendations for you to get your home and yard ready for the change in season to fall.
Decorate Your Home's Exterior
As the outside temperatures cool down you can take some time to transform the outside of your home to match the weather. Instead of outdoor sprinklers and swimming pools, you can replace them with signs of fall, such as pumpkins, scarecrows, and bags of leaves.
Use the organic materials you already have access to in your yard to reuse them for the season, and supplement them with additional items. For example, cut down the dead corn stalks from your vegetable garden and tie them together on your front porch to create an autumn display.
Next, find a nearby pumpkin patch where you can pick out your own pumpkins to set them on your front porch to bring in the cool weather. Look for orange- and white-colored pumpkins and smaller more interesting shaped gourds, such as Baby Pam, Munchkin, and Baby Boo pumpkins. As it gets closer to Halloween, you can consider carving your pumpkins into a jack o'lantern or cut them up and bake them into a pumpkin pie.
Prepare the Paved Areas
Just as you can take the time to decorate and arrange interesting settings on the outside of your home for the upcoming autumn holidays, you should make sure your paved areas are ready for frost and eventually snow. Whether your driveway is paved with concrete, asphalt, or compacted gravel, it is important to take specific measures to get each one ready for fall and winter.
Clear out the cracks in your asphalt and concrete by removing weeds and spraying out dirt and debris. This provides you a clean surface within the crack where you can patch them with appropriate crack filler. For example, for a concrete crack, select and use a concrete patching compound. And for asphalt, you can find a liquid asphalt filler or a cold patch mixture, which are sold at most home improvement stores.
Smooth out your gravel surface with a rake and supplement any bare areas with extra gravel, which you can find by the bags or from a local landscaping company. It is helpful to keep extra gravel on hand to fill in any voids within your grave paved area as they form.
