Linnaea Newman

It’s Thanksgiving week, and for those of us in the Interior Plantscaping business, you know what that means. All indoor malls are sporting holiday decorations, and those of us responsible for keeping the plants clean and green won’t have a chance to get in and wash the specimen trees until sometime after January 1st, when the decorations come down again.  This may seem too late to bring up the issue of washing trees, but scheduling, for a professional Interior Plantscaper, should be a natural part of the job, instead of waiting until the palms trees look like the one pictured below.  Obviously, this tree needs more than a simple cleaning at this point . . .

. . . but, if the trees have truly professional care, this problem could have been prevented before the spider mite population exploded.

Since all specimen trees need to be washed at least quarterly, and since holiday decorations are installed by the end of October, this translates into a final washing in early October, one following the decoration removal in early January, which makes the final two washings in April and July to space them out equally.

Since any pruning should be done before washing, that allows pruning and washing to be done in October, January, April and July.  Now you can schedule your Special Services work one year ahead with your mall clients, and look like the professional you are.

Where dust and spider mites are concerned, prevention is much easier than a cure, and rigorous cleaning on a quarterly basis can can prevent both.  Stay tuned to learn how to clean up an overly exhuberant spider mite population.