8 Winter Landscaping Services

8 winter landscaping services

It’s true that most landscaping and outdoor property maintenance occurs in spring and summer when nature is thriving and the weather is cooperating. But what many landscapers—and their clients—don’t realize is that there’s plenty of winter lawn care to be done during the colder months, too. You can create eye-catching winterized exteriors, clean up before the holidays, provide lawn maintenance, and preserve all that effort undertaken throughout the year.

If you’re a landscaper looking to add winter services to bolster your business during the winter season, we’ve got plenty of ideas to keep you busy in your local neighborhood.

#1 Winterize home gardens

While many people view the upkeep of home gardens as a relaxing pastime during warmer months, few are willing to spend the same amount of time on landscaping services once the cold weather sets in. Many who purchase flowers, vegetables, and shrubs in the summer are hard-pressed to know how to protect these plants from ice, frost, and plunging temperatures.

But if these potential clients have spent any significant amount of time in the garden over the year, it’s worth helping them understand that their investment should be protected during the winter.

This is why garden winterizing is a wonderful line of business to learn and offer. You can make money by offering services such as:

Garden bed protection
Pre-freeze bulb planting
Garden hose and water pipe cold-proofing
Mulching

For those with a green thumb, you can also provide consulting services on which plants need to be dug up and moved indoors, and even pitch in with the labor.

#2 Design winter-specific decorating

The winter months are a great time to cash in on the decorative side of landscaping.

As a landscaper, you can show off your creativity by working with customers to develop an outdoor design that utilizes classy winter-themed touches such as silver and gold metal light fixtures, wreaths, and festive decor

This is also a great time to incorporate wintry additions straight from nature, including

Poinsettias
Winterberries
Fir garlands
Evergreen trees

One of the benefits of offering this service is that you can work with the customer directly to develop and execute a vision for their yard. A well-maintained, winterized property is a wonderful gift to give during this time of year.

#3 Install winterized decks and seating

Do you have neighbors who just can’t seem to stay indoors when the temperatures drop? It’s possible the landscaping service they need is an outdoor seating area—but they just don’t know it yet.

Take a page out of All Decked Out’s playbook when planning this winter-ready service. They’re a landscaping and building business that specializes in urban gardens and decks, complete with seating, decor, lighting, planters, and more.

Your winterized service might include:

No-slip flooring or decking
Waterproof seating
A weatherproof storage box for cushions and blankets
Seasonal decor
Fire pits or built-in heaters

#4 Build fire pits

Part of a deck installation or as the main event, fire pits offer moments of outdoor coziness for everyone to enjoy. Before offering this service, don’t forget to get in touch with local fire authorities to ensure you’re creating safe and legal spaces for your customers to enjoy.

Fire pits are fully customizable and can be above-ground, in-ground, or tabletop. You can also work with clients to decide on a look that matches their personal style, crafting a unique design that makes use of different materials like:

Brick
Iron
Stone
Lava rocks
Gravel

Onorato Landscaping in Cliffside Park, New Jersey makes excellent use of stone and pavers in their outdoor fire pits and fireplaces. They give their customers full customization capabilities—round or square, pit or place, materials, how it blends into the existing landscape, the whole nine yards.

#5 Install holiday lights

Landscape lighting can be a seriously lucrative business, especially if you can offer comprehensive services like design, set up, tear down, and all the decor involved in the display—this is exactly what Hambleton Lawn & Landscape offers their customers during the off-season. And while many homeowners choose to hang their lights themselves, plenty of families are willing to pay a pretty penny to avoid climbing up on the roof themselves.

For the average home, a no-frills display can net you between $100-$300 dollars, according to Home Depot. But in reality, the sky’s the limit when it comes to creating elaborate string lighting designs, installing towering, light-up characters and scenes, and handling the electrical concerns involved

For everything you need to know about running a successful holiday light business, check out our comprehensive guide. You can also further differentiate yourself with unique accents such as lanterns, icicle lights, and LED birch trees. You’ll light up customer faces with your one-of-a-kind designs, and net extra cash while you’re at it.

#6 Clean it up

Basic maintenance services shouldn’t be overlooked as you plan for the winter season. You can keep your clients’ spaces in tip-top shape so they don’t have to worry about their outdoor spaces deteriorating by springtime.

These simple but essential services include:

Pruning
Clearing away fallen leaves and dead branches
Mulching
Spraying pre-emergents
Lawn aeration

These are easy, effective ways to keep lawns and gardens healthy when it’s cold and to make sure they’re ready for when it begins to thaw.

#7 Snow removal service

Plenty of winter lawn care services turn to snow removal when the seasons turn. It’s one of their clients’ greatest needs—and biggest pain points. If you can alleviate the stress of snow removal, you’ll have a whole slew of happy customers at the end of the year.

Beyond just shoveling or snow plowing, winter landscaping ideas can include:

Applying salt to walkways and driveways
Cleaning up and clearing debris after a serious storm
Performing safety inspections
Deploying preventative measures as the season approaches
Ice management
Treating snow mold

#8 Landscape according to theme

While pruning and mulching can provide income for your lawn care business in the winter months, you may be able to create more value for a customer by working with them to create a themed, winter design that transforms their home into that house.

To this end, we recommend collaborating to come up with a theme that caters to their aesthetic while offering opportunities to brighten and bring unity to their lawn and outdoor spaces. Maybe they celebrate a specific winter holiday like Christmas, or maybe they prefer a non-denominational design, featuring snowmen instead of Santas and evergreen branches instead of elves. Here are a few seasonal suggestions to inspire your creativity:

Winter wonderland – White lighting, potted firs, and cold-weather grasses can achieve a cool, sophisticated tone. Keep things muted in color by sticking to accents that are white, blue, and silver, and layer sidewalks and backyard paths with gravel for a natural, earthy look.
Berry-licious pops of color – Brighten up your clients’ yards with pleasing colors naturally derived from berries, holly, and blood twig dogwood. Create towering displays using winter florals and garland, and add multi-colored string lights lining the roof or criss crossing across the yard.
Bright lights, big display – Lighting can add brilliance and elegance to any design, but it can also be the design. Consider wrapping all trees on your client’s property with strings of lights, creating a stunning, elfin forest vibe, or installing lighting along all trim of the house to achieve a glow-up that the whole neighborhood will notice.

Landscaping is all about creating a beautiful, functional outdoor environment for clients—the same idea applies here, only with a seasonal theme. You can easily apply your team’s expertise to a new task and continue to grow your business all year round.

Every neighborhood is different—find out what yours needs

Though there’s plenty to be done, some clients will still take the hibernation approach and ignore their yards and outdoor spaces until it’s warm enough to venture outside again.

One of your tasks is to determine their potential needs in the winter months and craft services around them. To this end, we recommend taking a peek around your neighborhood, speaking with neighbors about what tasks they don’t want to do this holiday season, and developing a portfolio of services that let them stay inside sipping cocoa while you do the hard work of beautifying the exteriors of their homes.

With these additional services, naturally, winter landscape pricing would be different. Keep this in mind when adding the prices to your list.

Landscape well into the winter with Nextdoor

You can help the whole community look its winter best with your landscaping services. But to alert current—and potential—customers about your newly launched winter landscaping services, you’ll need a direct line of communication with them.

Create a free Business Page on Nextdoor to open your door to new clients. Not only will this allow you to help your neighbors get to know your business, but you can also promote your products, highlight your expertise, and stand out from the competition in the Nextdoor newsfeed with engaging posts and photos.

At Nextdoor, we want to bring neighborhoods together. Connect with locals today by creating a free Nextdoor Business Page and contributing to our growing community of residents, visitors, and business owners.