SPRING &
FALL CLEANUPS. — Spring & Fall Yard Cleanups, Lakeville & South Metro — Lofton Landscaping, serving Lakeville, Savage, Prior Lake, Burnsville, Apple Valley, Rosemount, Farmington and Eagan.

Trees don't drop on a single day, and different species finish weeks apart. Maples go early; oaks hang on, sometimes into November, sometimes past the first snow. A single October cleanup on a heavily canopied Eagan or Burnsville lot means you've paid for a tidy lawn that's buried again by the first week of November.

So we schedule those properties as multi-pass work and price it that way up front. You know how many visits you're getting and what it costs before we start, rather than getting a tidy yard and a second invoice.

It matters beyond appearance. A wet leaf mat left on turf over winter blocks light and traps moisture, and what comes out from under it in April is a matted, disease-prone lawn with bare patches. Getting the leaf off before snow-cover is genuinely the cheapest lawn treatment there is.

The instinct is to get out there the first warm week. Doing that on ground that's still saturated is how a lawn gets rutted by equipment and compacted by foot traffic — damage that takes the whole season to grow out.

We wait for the ground to carry weight. On the low ground near the Vermillion River in Farmington, or the river-bottom side of Savage, that's usually a week or so later than the rest of our route, and we'd rather explain the delay than repair the lawn.

The spring pass itself is leaf and debris off, perennials cut back if they were left standing for winter interest, beds re-edged, and a dethatch where the turf has matted. That last one is what makes a lawn green up evenly instead of in patches.

It leaves with us. Leaves and cut-back material get hauled off rather than bagged and left at the kerb for you to deal with, and rather than blown into the treeline where they mat down and kill whatever's underneath.

The exception is when a customer wants material kept for their own compost, which is a good instinct and easy to accommodate — tell us at quote stage and we'll stage it where you want it.