Spring Cleanup in the GTA: The Order We Do Things

The first mild week of March flips a switch in people. I get it. After four months of grey, everyone wants to fix the yard in a single Saturday.

Here's the thing though: a cleanup done in the wrong order, or too early, creates problems that last into summer. So let me lay out the sequence our crews actually follow, because the order is most of the skill.

First, the one big warning

Stay off wet soil. Most of the GTA gardens on clay, and clay that's saturated with snowmelt compacts like pottery under boots and wheelbarrows. Compacted soil grows worse everything, all season, and fixing it is far harder than avoiding it.

The test is simple. Squeeze a handful of soil. If it stays in a shiny ball, the garden isn't ready for traffic. If it crumbles, go ahead. Some years that's mid March, some years it's mid April. The calendar doesn't decide, the soil does.

The sequence

1. Walk and assess. Before touching anything, we walk the property and list winter damage: broken branches, heaved plants, salt burn, grade changes where water pooled. Ten minutes of looking saves a whole day of doubling back.

2. Hard surfaces first. Sweep and collect the winter grit and leftover salt off walks, patios and driveway edges. Do this before bed work so none of it ends up raked into the soil, and check paver joints while you're down there.

3. Cut back what winter left standing. The grasses and perennial stems we leave up for structure come down now. We stage this one though. A lot of beneficial insects overwinter inside hollow stems, so anything cut early gets stacked loosely in a back corner for a few weeks instead of going straight into paper bags. Same tidy garden, better outcome for the pollinators.

4. Edges before mulch. Recutting bed edges while the soil is soft is the single highest impact hour you can spend on a garden's appearance. A crisp edge makes even an average bed look deliberate.

5. The lawn, gently. A light rake to lift matted spots and clear debris. If you see grey or pink crusty patches, that's snow mould; rake them open to the air and they usually recover. What most lawns don't need is an aggressive power raking, that's for genuine thatch problems, not a reflex.

6. First mow on the high side. When the grass is finally growing and dry, mow, but keep it around eight centimetres. Scalping a lawn in April is an invitation to crabgrass in July.

7. Mulch last. Mulch goes down after the soil has warmed and dried a little, usually well into May for us. Mulching cold wet clay in early April traps it cold and wet. Patience here pays all summer.

What we skip

No fabric under the mulch, ever. No fertilizing before the lawn is actively growing. And no cutting back anything spring-flowering, the forsythia and lilacs already set their buds last summer.

That's the whole playbook. It's less about effort than about sequence and timing, and the difference shows by June.

Our spring cleanup calendar fills fast once the soil dries out, so if you'd rather hand the whole list to one crew, get on the schedule now.