tackle important jobs at home, but don’t exactly know how to do them or where to begin, here are three suggestions along with a few tidbits of insight from an expert in the field.

According to Julien La Salle from La Salle Property Maintenance and Snow Removal in Grand Calumet Island, fall is the perfect time of year to focus on cleaning clutter around one’s property in order to make the transition from fall to winter as smooth as possible.

“You’re tidying everything up basically at this time of year,” he said. “You go over your flowerbeds and you’re getting ready for winter.”

An important step that folks often don’t take into account when going from fall to winter is lawn fertilization, La Salle said.

Since fertilizers come in a wide variety of brands and ingredient combinations made for all sorts of different soil textures, ensuring that you’re using the right type of fall mixture plays a significant role when it comes to retaining high-quality grass through the winter.

“You’ve got to look at your property and figure out what type of soil is in it,” he said. “It depends on if it’s cleaner, sandier, if there’s gravel or it could be yellow dirt.”

Fertilizing one’s lawn ahead of the winter gives it the nutrients necessary to survive through the freeze, which plays a significant role in keeping the grass in good shape for when the snow melts, La Salle said.

“In the spring, your grass will be nice,” he said. “It won’t be all dirt and patchy.”

La Salle added that grass can grow back without using fertilizer, however it makes the process considerably less seamless.

Another project people should take care of at this time of year is trimming dead branches from trees, shrubs and cedar hedges.

While some shrubs can wait until the spring to be worked on, avoiding to cut them can lead them to take longer to bloom after the winter or even overgrow, which in both cases can cause an ugly mess.

“It gives them the strength in the spring to grow,” he said. “A shrub is almost like a haircut. It’s always going to regrow. Cedar hedges should be cut once per year.”

Last but not least, never forget to clean out your eavestroughs of any fallen leaves, broken roof shingles and tree branches before the pipes get filled with ice in the winter.

Uncleaned frozen pipes tend to lead to water leakage inside the home, which can be significantly costly and time consuming to repair.

“Take all the leaves out of there, the pine needles,” he said. “Make sure that water’s coming down and that there’s nothing blocked there.”

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