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Author: Landscape Management

Back off moron, you’re risking my life!

Rant *** (three stars) I’ve gotten fond of living. Living is a good thing. You know flowers, sunshine, friends, family . . . all that stuff. Getting squashed on the the grill of some big truck, like the white Ford 250 pulling a trailer of landscape gear that was riding the bumper of my puny […]

120 bans in place — but who’s counting, huh?

Check off picturesque Comox, British Columbia, as the latest Canadian community to ban the use of synthetic pesticides for lawn care, the 120th community in Canada to do so. As usual, opponents of commercial lawn care pounded on the alleged risk associated with using special chemicals for purely aesthetic reasons. Comox is a seaside city […]

Anti-Lawncare D Day approaches

November is the projected kickoff launch of “The Year of the Safe Lawn” aimed at alerting the American public to the potential environmental harmn caused by tradtional lawn care products. The campaign is being spearheaded by HGTV host Paul Tukey and is planning to address the issues of pesticides, water and fossil fuel use on […]

Take your office on the road

In the landscaping business, you spend most of your day away from the office, either on the job or on the road. With that in mind, Ford is making it easier to do office duties right from your truck. Check out this article from the Detroit Free Press on a new portable computer system that […]

Time to reduce the number of huge flying rats

Beautiful to see in the sky, unwanted destructive guests that don’t know when to leave on our grounds. Take heart fellow grounds pros; a new rule issued by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services this past August, and that subsequently has become law, takes aim at the exploding populations of “resident” Canada geese. The law […]

Did you start out like this?

A big rave for this young man. Josh Boersma really knows how to “run” a business. When the 18-year-old seniort at Ankeny High School near Des Moines, IA, leaves school at noon he puts on his business owner hat (Boersma Lawn Care) and spends several hours mowing or fertilizing several of his 13 accounts. Then […]

Reflections on 9/11

I think we will always remember where we were on Sept. 11, 2001. On this five-year anniversary of the attacks, let’s take a few moments to remember all the heroes — from the NYPD and FD, to the passengers aboard United 93 — who gave their lives that day. Here’s a column I wrote for […]

Chainsaw murderer spooks landscapers?

People referred to him as “Crazy Chris,” and if what he’s accused of doing is true, crazy falls just a click or two short of describing this whacko. Christian C. Nielsen, 31, (aka Crazy Chris), a cook at an inn near Newry, ME, is accused of killing and dismembering, with a chain saw, three people […]

Elvis has left the house, but ServiceMaster is moving in

ServiceMaster, parent company of TruGreen ChemLawn, TruGreen Landscare and Terminix, is moving the 120 managers and executives remaining in its longtime headquarters in Downers Grove, IL, (a Chicago suburb) to Memphis. And why not? It’s principle operating divisions, including about 2,000 employees, are already based there. Did we mention ServiceMaster’s new chairman and CEO, J. […]

Knotty knotweed dilemma

Council members on Bainbridge Island, WA, said that chemical pest controls were verbotin on public properties . . .That was until a week or so ago. Because the island was being swallowed by knotweed, they softened their stance somewhat and approved the use of the herbicide glyphosate (Roundup). Knotweed is a nasty non-native invasive weed […]

What the hell is RSS?

When readers visit LM’s Web page they can submit a question via e-mail and those questions are routed to me. The other day I got a good one: “I see a line on your page that tells me to click on it for an RSS link. What the hell is RSS?” RSS, a digital-universe term […]

ServiceMaster hdqtrs relocating to Memphis?

Could ServiceMaster (NYSE-SVM) be moving its headquarters from its longtime location in Downers Grove, IL, to this vibrant mid-South city? That’s more than a possibility, reports the Memphis Commercial Appea, quoting a city councilman there. ServiceMaster is the parent company of TruGreen ChemLawn, TruGreen Landcare, Terminix, American Home Shield among others. It employs 170 in […]

Hazardous-duty pay warranted

The biggest hazard to a landscape worker on the job? 1. Big machinery with whirring blades?2. Relentless exposure to the sun and heat?3. Robbers, lunatics and morons? If you answered #3 you’re right. This past week alone landscape worker Tereso Vasquex Gonzalez was shot in the back and killed as he tried to walk away […]

Would you turn these morons in?

A good friend, the owner of a nice lawn care company in Texas, called me the other day with a lot of bad news. In addition to telling me about a mutual friend being diagnosed with a serious ailment, he said one of his techs was treating a lawn and looked over to an adjacent […]

The real champion please speak up

The 2-year extension of the H2B seasonal immigrant guest worker program expires Sept. 30. And everybody – I mean everybody – is strangely quiet about getting a new extension signed into law. Ok, so I’ll give it a shot. I’m saying 50-50 that a new 2- or 3-year extension of the so-called Save Our Small […]

Lawn care’s founder a woman?

Elizabeth Senske, 87, died last week. Who’s Elizabeth Senske you ask? She, along with Bill her husband of 65 years, founded what may have been the first professional lawn spray company in the United States. In 1947, shortly afer moving to Spokane, WA, the couple began Senske Lawn & Tree Company. In the 1950s she […]

It’s time to cut the crap

Dog poop. I hate dog poop. I hate walking a dog – in this case my son’s 14-year-old beagle, Sparky – and having to pick up its poop. My son Jason, who wouldn’t part with Sparky for a new GMC pickup, is living in an apartrment while he works in our area this sxummer. The […]

Turn down the flame . . . please

It’s official. The average temperature for the continental United States from January through June 2006 was the warmest first half of any year since records betan in 1895, say scientists at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, NC. June was the second warmest on record. The average Jun.-June temperature for the contilguuous United States […]

The most dangerous thing of all

More than 40,000 people in the U.S. die annually as the result of automobile accidents, yet many us accept bad and aggressive driving like it’s a God-given right to endanger not only ourselves but anybody unlikely enough to get in our way. Traveling our highways is dangerous business for sure, but who would think that […]

Hazards of landscaping — grenades, lightning

Along with the usual hazards of the job (heat, working with whirring blades and big equipment, low-hanging branches) comes the hazard of digging up a live gernade with the pin pulled. A 23-year-old landscaper, digging outside a building housing an architecture firm in Elm Grove, WI, turned up the gernade, which was buried under about […]

Time to clone Fogarty?

This year’s Renewal and Remembrance service project was huge, almost 300 volunteers working in Arlington National and Congressional Cemeteries in Washington D.C. Workers flooded in from just about every Green Industry service sector — landscapers, lawn care folks, irrigation pros, arborists., and lots of their family members, too. Every year more wives and sons and […]

They want their MTV . . .erhh, make that pesticides

Now that Canada’s Quebec Province has all but made the possession and use of lawn chemicals a capital offense (ok, so I’m exaggerating a bit), homeowners there have been heading to nearby Ontario Province to stock up on bug and weed killers. Government officials say there’s no way to combat this heinous activity, and they’re […]

Seed prices going up

If buy perennial ryegrass or turf-type tall fescue seed, expect to pay more this year, as much as 20% more for perennial rye and the price of tall fescue is expected to be about 15% higher. Demand for seed was high this past spring and this year’s crops are average, reports TMI Times, the weekly […]

Time to shrink your routes?

Bombs. Rockets. Air strikes. There’s nothing more predictable than people killing each other in the Middle East. With the price of a barrel of crude oil topping $78 in reaction to the escalating violence, who isn’t expecting the price of gasoline and diesel to break the $3-per-gallon barrier. If you would have asked me a […]

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