Spring Yard Reset

Audio from our free seasonal tasks masterclass on March 31  

Spring makes people want to rush outside and “fix” the yard, but we’ve learned that the fastest way to a healthier landscape is slowing down. We kick off with a practical Upper Midwest spring gardening checklist: last-chance dormant-season pruning for shrubs and fruit trees, a clear warning to leave oak trees alone once temperatures warm, and a gentler spring cleanup that protects overwintering native bees, caterpillars, and other beneficial insects. If you only tidy one spot, we suggest keeping it near high-visibility areas and leaving the rest of the habitat intact a bit longer. 

From there, we get into planting and maintenance decisions that actually make life easier. We talk about timing for perennials and native grasses, early cool-season vegetable seeding, and why “leave the leaves” still applies in spring. We also share our take on bed edging, why we minimize dyed mulch, when bird feeders should come down, and how lilacs are getting thrown off by climate patterns plus when to prune them without losing blooms. You’ll also hear how we aim for a realistic sweet spot with natives while still leaving room for fun color like dahlias and gladiolus. 

Then we shift into spring lawn care: overseeding a bee lawn with clover and other pollinator-friendly plants, mowing higher for deeper roots, why we skip No Mow May here, and the hard no on Weed and Feed. We cover irrigation timing, power raking myths, and a simple organic fertilizer approach including the half-pound nitrogen guideline. If you want a yard that saves water, stores carbon, and feeds pollinators, this one’s for you. Subscribe, share with a neighbor who loves their lawn, and leave a review with your biggest spring yard question.

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Transcript

Welcome And Spring Preview

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hello, everybody. Thanks for being here, everybody. Katie's great to see you. John, great to see you too. Thank you very much. And whoever else uh joinings, it's great to have folks here. So today we are going to talk about spring. So I'm really excited to have folks here. We had, at least here in Shakapee, it was nearly 80 degrees on Saturday. So we're here Sunday evening. It's a whole different day out today, but it was super, super, super nice. So I was very happy that, and figuring it all out as we uh head into this next season for things. So there are a couple things I want to go over first uh to make sure that are done and ready to go from winter at this point. And so number one on winter is pruning. It is the very last gasp, the very last time where we should do any major sword pruning on most of our plants here in the upper Midwest. And so, with that, all of our shrubs. If you have any shrubs that are overgrown, if you have any shrubs that are looking a little sad and looking a little like they need some help, right now is the time, the last time that you can go and prune those shrubs and do that. So we highly recommend uh rejuvenation pruning. And so we talk all about that here at Minnesota at oh, I almost said Minnesota Gardening, a better yard. I forgot that we had uh new name for where we're at here. I'm not quite used to the whole thing yet. So it is great to have everybody here at a better yard. So uh just so everybody knows we used to be Minnesota Gardening and we switched over to a better yard um January 1st of this year. So I'm excited to have folks here with that. With winter, uh, there are a couple main things that we need to make sure that we are doing from winter, and that is pruning. Also pruning any fruit trees. Again, the very, very last gasp for doing those kinds of things. So fruit trees. And now it is too late. Do not, unless you're probably in northern Minnesota near the Canadian border, it would still be fine. But do not prune any oak trees now. Uh, time for pruning oak trees is done because they are vulnerable to a lot of different funguses that are really bad for oak trees. And so make sure to leave those alone from now until fall, even next dormant season. So don't prune your oak trees, don't cut any limbs off, don't even break branches if you can avoid it. So leave those alone from here on out. So those are the main things from winter that you need to make sure to have done. And then let me pull up here. We're gonna all right. So we have, for those who haven't been looking at it too much, we have a brand new home base here for a better yard. So I'm pretty excited about where everything's been going and what we've been doing. We've consolidated a lot of things into just having things in the home base for everybody for all of our uh rebel tasks of uh not following the status quo and making sure that we are making the world a better place one yard at a time. Over here we have the seasons calendar, which has not been updated with our new theme and all of our things yet, but here it is nonetheless. And so everybody has access to the seasons calendar over here in the uh uh uh sidebar. And so with that, we have landscapes. So just pull this up here. So we're gonna talk through these. So spring is here. Yesterday was the first official day of spring, or day before yesterday, actually. And uh, so I'm really excited. Turns out my kid is spring, is her favorite holiday, holiday season, which I'm pretty shocked at. I had no idea that spring was her favorite season, and spring is my least favorite season. So obviously I'm doing a terrible job at parenting, but we'll we'll try and there's still time like that one. She's a freshman in high school. And so right now we need to pick and time things so that we are making sure that we're taking care of our landscapes and that we are making sure to allow nature to kind of run its course. So right now, still sleeping, maybe after Saturday when it was 80 degrees, right now, still sleeping in our landscapes are overwintering bees and native bees and caterpillars and insects and bugs and all those other friends that we have that we know we want to support in our landscapes. And so we want to leave them there. So uh we talk a lot in the fall about leave the leaves. We continue to do that in the spring. So we want to leave the leaves, we want to do that kind of thing. We want to wait and do our spring cleanup later on. There's not much that we actually need to do. So if there are places that you want to focus on keeping extra tidy or looking really nice, like by front doors or driveways or that kind of thing, you can go ahead and clean those up. Any hard stem sticks, those kinds of things, cut those down to about 24 inches. Don't cut them any shorter than that because those are great places for this coming fall for our stem boring insects and other friends to live in those stems, in those perennials, in those grasses, in those shrubs. Uh, so cut those back and uh leave those up and available for those overwhelming insects to have access to. And so if you have any questions or need anything, just you can use the chat to ask those questions. And so we've got spring cleanup, oak trees, we talked a little bit about. We have uh oak trees, do not prune them. Even though it says April, once it hits 70 degrees, what happens is there is a um an insect that flies around and is very attracted to uh pruning cuts and those kinds of things from oak trees. And so this is specifically a problem for red oak trees, the biggest one that gets hit by oak quilt. And that's the one that we want to make sure that we're protecting as much as possible. But we just want to do blanket oaks, uh, do not prune them during any of the growing season. And right now we are in a at the very beginning uh phases of a growing season. So you want to make sure to let those oak trees uh hang out and not do anything with those until next fall, once we get back into another growing season. So dormant time is the best time and the only time where we want to prune oak trees. So with plantings, we are very close to starting to plant prails and grasses. And so with that, we want to start those in May, June, getting those in the ground. Like right now, if you have gardens and that kind of thing, you can start to plant seeds that are cool season seeds in vegetables and that kind of thing. Those kinds of things can all have a uh have a great time getting those going. They'll start plant, they'll start growing whenever they want to, and it's a good time for those early season kinds of things. But with perennials, you want to make sure that they are totally woken up before you really start handling them and moving them around. I had um a this weekend, let's go here. Uh, I was so, so excited to see these babies. This is a pasque flower. So P-A-S-Q-U-E. So it's a pasque flower, and it was just starting to grow. And so these are gonna be the buds for the flowers. They're one of the earliest flowering plants, and I'll pull up here. This is a pasque flower. So this is what they look like when they're blooming. So you see those fuzzy little fuzzy heads there. So those are the blooms that are coming out, and so the the foliage is yet to come, but they get these just happy, happy, happy purple flowers. And so this is another as a past flower is coming up. Um, but this is actually those same plants that I took a picture of. I went and checked on them. So last year they did a control burn at the swamp that I love to go to. And this is what they looked like last year after the burn came through. So the ground got too hot and so it burned off the buds, so they weren't able to flower, but they are uh there. So it's a past flower that is coming up and is super happy and uh really moving forward. Hi, Holly. Hi, Jody. Thanks for joining. So we've got plantings. So March here at A Better Yard, we have the on-your own planting this year. So it's a native planting, and we're talking all about native plantings the month of March. And then in April, we start talking all about maintenance. And so we go through the maintenance basics to make sure that we're using the fewest chemicals, supporting pollinators, saving water, and storing carbon. So those are all really good things. April is a really great time to do bed edging. So I hate using edging, so like plastic edging, metal edging, that kind of thing, because it just gets in the way of our landscape beds moving around and that. So, what we do is we do advocate any new beds that you put in that we use spade edging if you really need a clean edge, or just no edging at all, and just fill it with plants so that they uh compete and they get the turf grass out of there and they do really great things. So, bed edging we want to avoid as much as possible. And really the same thing with mulching. So, I used to be a big, big fan of mulching when we mulched everything because it felt like the natural thing to do, emulated in the forest floor, but it's really not. It's got a lot of chemicals in those mulches, the colors in those mulches are really detrimental to our insect friends. And so we don't want to use those if we don't have to use those. And so you're better off planting beds if you have like a tree ring where you've got a tree ring or you've got a mulched bed underneath of that tree ring. It's a really good idea to think about over the course of however many years that you want to have that be a place where you are installing native plants to make sure that those are uh growing underneath that tree and they are really good for the world for a variety of reasons. And so we want to reduce that mulch use as much as we can, which then also makes your life easier so you don't have to mulch every spring on things. Bird feeders, we have a really great podcast all about bird feeders and removing bird feeders this time of year. So once these are plants start to grow and start to have seeds and those kinds of things. So, really in May is the best time to remove those bird feeders, unless you have an absolute reason for having them. Bird feeders should be removed in the spring. And so letting them roll from there, and those plants will do a great job of feeding your bird friends. So in March and April, you want to remove the tree wrap uh that you put on last fall. Lilacs, I always get a lot of questions about lilacs. So lilacs are not native plants to Minnesota, but they also do quite a bit of help for early season pollen for things, but they're not, we don't advocate planting a lot of lilacs, but they're a quintessential Minnesota plant, upper Midwest plant that you see all over the place. They are, however, really, really struggling of late. So the last few years, they have been blooming at wrong times. They have blooming in the fall, they've been blooming in the late summer. They just don't know. Climate change is doing quite the disservice to lilacs. And so uh a lot of lilacs are struggling and not blooming the way they should in the spring and just doing the thing that they normally have been doing for us. So if your lilac is struggling, it's probably a good idea to cut it all the way back. And like I cut my lilac back. I have a common lilac, and so I uh cut it back uh this winter because it was been struggling with the seasons and with climate change. And so I want to force new growth. So hopefully that helps it a little bit. But it has just been having a really rough time with blooming in the fall, and it's uh bad for our plant friends. And climate change is uh just negative all over the place. So we've got lilacs that you want to prune after they're done blooming. So if you have a lot of blossoms that are coming on your lilacs, you want to prune them after they are completed with their bloom cycle. Because uh if you prune them uh anytime after uh June or so, you're cutting off those blooms. And so that time of year, that uh May to June, early July time frame is the time for pruning lilacs. Everything else, you want to prune it right now. Um, during the dormant season, I guess is a better way to say that. Again, if you have any questions or need anything, just add them in the chat and I will answer them for everybody. So summer bulbs are the next one. So we're getting close to the summer bulb season for like putting dahlias in the ground, gladiolas, cannas. These are all things that are not native plants, but they add extra color and they add extra, you know, spice to our landscapes that we like to have. Some people don't want to have, obviously, all native plants. And so we kind of advocate for a sweet spot around 75 to 80 percent of the plants in our landscapes being native to the area where you're at, or at least helpful for pollinators and for insects and for songbirds and those types of friends that we've got. Summer bulbs are not native to the upper Midwest whatsoever, but they can also add color and help in our landscapes. So those are good there. We don't need to be purists about anything as we go forward with this. So uh then spring is a really difficult time. So making sure that we are staying on top of weeding and making sure that we are doing that. This is a more of a June kind of problem that we have in the springtime. So May, June, that time frame is when we really start to run into issues with weeds, uh, perennials and grasses. And so this is a good time of year if you have, let's say, uh clumping grasses or perennials that have grown. So if you have things around like irises, day lilies, those things that tend to grow a bunch, you can either pull them, you can divide them, split them into pieces, and then plant them in other places. But there are a lot of plants that really do well. Uh, you can divide them and share them within your landscape. So let's say a great example is Joe Pie weed. Joe Pie weed is a wonderful, wonderful native plant to the upper Midwest. And so it grows the soil. It is five or six years old, that kind of thing. You can pull up some joe pie weed here. So everybody knows what I'm talking about. Joe pie weed is this awesome guy here. So joe pie weed is just a really, really great plant. Uh so this is the the there's a big form and then uh a miniature kind of smaller jopie weed. But this is Joe Pie here, and so it tends to really kind of dominate areas. And so if you want to spread it around, you can just this time of year, you can take a spade and cut out a section of it and then just move it around. And that way it'll start growing wherever you're at. Make sure to get as much of the roots as you possibly can, and then you can have more plants. So it's all time of year for spring annuals, so pansies, snapdragons, those kinds of things are really great this time of year. Um, that is a lot of the landscape side of the spring task. So do your spring cleanup, which again needs to be minimal. We want to leave the leaves, leave the stems, do all that kind of stuff, and let all of our overending friends have that access to our plants. And there's kind of through this whole, there's a lot of crazy information that comes out through this whole movement around leaving the leaves and making sure that we're leaving access for our insect friends that like 50 degrees is a tipping point for once it's consistently 50 degrees, that all the insects have emerged and all the things have happened, and it's just not the way, not the way it works. They emerge when they want to emerge. So just do everything you can to leave those areas alone and don't worry about what they look like and tidying up wherever you can do that. But also, if it's an area that you want to look clean and tidied up, then go ahead and do that. It's okay. There are no hard and fast rules for how you need to and must do this work. So don't plan your uh don't prune your oak trees uh after they start to grow or after those buds start to swell. You want to leave them alone from there on out. Uh, planting is a great time. March is the month that we are working on planning out our uh landscape beds for the year. Bed edging is great. Mulching, you want to minimize that as much as possible and remove those bird feeders. So next we're gonna head to uh lawn care. And so here at a better yard, we believe that we need to make sure that we are minimizing the use of lawns as much as possible. And so we want to have lawns that are giving to our community instead of just taking away from everything and needing water and needing chemicals and needing those kinds of things that really do hurt uh our neighborhoods. And so we want to do as much as we can. And this is the great time of year to make sure that we are adding bee-friendly seed to our lawns. And so March, June, once it starts to get, this is a time where we can use the 50 degrees as a good guideline. So once it starts to get completely consistently over 50 degrees, it is a really great thing to if you have any bear spots, if you have any uh things you want to do, that this is the time of year, second best time of year, fall is the best time of year for most of your landscape projects. But this is your second best time of year to add bee lawn seeds to your turf. And so that'll be clovers, that'll be pussy toes, that will be tree foils, that'll be things that have early flowering, especially, that are here for our uh insects to get for our native bees to have pollen for pollinators and making sure that we are feeding a variety of pollinators and insects and songbirds in our landscape as opposed to just having a desolate lawn area that isn't used for anything. Mowing, mow as high as you can. So make sure that that mower is as tall as you possibly can get it, so that we are shading the uh root system so that we are not having to water it, that we aren't having it break down and that kind of thing. Do not, sorry, this is hard for some folks, but do not participate in no moi. It's a bad plan. It doesn't help anything and it ends up hurting in the end, especially in our upper Midwest climate. There are places that it works and that it can do well, um, but here it's a bad idea. So don't uh don't do that. Sorry, so there's some uh questions. So I'm battling swamp milkweed where I don't want it. Uh swamp milkweed is a uh is a rough one, to say the least. It can be very, very aggressive. And so we I advocate very much to use minimum amount of chemicals, but if there are places where you don't want things, a swamp milkweed will be really difficult to get rid of because it has a lot of rhizomes that grow just under the soil. And so you can pull it as many times as you want to get rid of that swamp milkweed. So swamp milkweed is great for monarchs, it's great for other butterflies and insects, but it's also aggressive and it will take over places and it's kind of gangly and it gets a lot of different aphids and a lot of other things on there. So if you don't want it, pull it. And if you pulling it isn't working, then you can, I think it's okay to spray a few things as long as you are minimizing as much as possible. So swamp milkweed can be a rough one. I've got enough space in my backyard uh that I don't worry about swamp milkweed. It just kind of does its thing and we we let it hang out and it's okay. But where's a good place to source clover and other turf filler? I had trouble finding it a couple years back. So I will put the link for Twin Cities Seed. They are even Twin City Seed, like I'm not affiliated with them at all, but they're just a wonderful, wonderful company that has a lot of good stuff for everybody. So I will put in the chat the link to pollinator seeds. So they have uh, as you can see here, they have beelons, they have different types of beelons. So this is just a lot of clover overseeding. So this is probably the way you would want to go, but it has a lot of really good stuff in there with different types of clovers and yarrow and other things that really do well. So felt heel, um, trying to see what other seeds this has in it, but they have uh a lot of really great stuff. Uh so this is the native beelon seed, it is a little more difficult. It doesn't work quite as well yet. They're still experimenting with them, but that's been my experience with them is that uh they are great and it's a very good idea. Um, this is a cool picture because as you can see if it'll let us zoom into this picture or not. But you can see here this spot on this bumblebee is a pollen sack. And in that one right there, it is just absolutely chock full of pollen that will take back to the hive or to its uh uh uh deposit the pollen for its babies. And so that's a really cool thing to have in the pictures that they have pollen sacks on their legs, and it's really important to have that. So I highly recommend Twin Cities. See, they do just a really great job for folks. Does an established natural turf tend to naturally fight weeds? You'll have to help me out, Holly, with natural turf. It is depending on what your goals are with things. So if you have a pristine turf, uh turf grass that looks like, you know, center field or the fourth fairway, stonebrook, or whatever that may be, that is really hard to hide weeds. And so anytime you have weeds in there, they just stand out and they look very much like they're not supposed to, and you just don't care and that kind of thing. So that's why we highly, highly, highly advocate not using as much chemicals or any if you can get away with it, so that there are some weeds in there so that when there are weeds that they don't really um uh let's see. Yeah, looking to take out all my grass and put it between raised beds. Yeah, that's there's they're really great. Like clover is really great for this. There are a lot of very low maintenance turf grass blends. These here with Twin Cities Feed will do a really great job for all of those things. So, and I can help you find that. But like these clover mixes are perfect for in between in between raised beds and that kind of thing. It's a very, very good spot to be. So I yeah, absolutely. And you then you don't have to use any chemicals whatsoever. You don't have to kill anything, and uh, that is good for all of your plants and all of our friends and rolling through there. So, yeah, absolutely. Sorry, I fell behind on my questions there. Justin Brian, it's great to see you. Thanks for being here. Alright, so no mo may was where I left off. Weed and feed, do not, do not, do not please use weed and feed products. They are just plain bad. I've been working on trying to outlaw them in the state of Minnesota and I've had no luck yet, but we'll I'll get there eventually. And so weed and feed products are bad because they spread chemicals everywhere instead of just where you need them. And so it's uh people feel like they are just a really easy, convenient way to go about things, but it's really just spreading a lot more chemicals than you need to spread. And so absolutely do not use weed and feed products if you want to fertilize, fertilize with half a pound of uh nitrogen per thousand square feet, so that you're putting down fertilizer at very low rates. You do that uh around Memorial Day and around Labor Day. Those are the two best times to do that. And then you just spot spray if you have a big problem with weeds, if you care about weeds, you just spot spray those and treat those as they go along. But using this pre-emergence, and these things are really, really dangerous and causing problems. So if you have an irrigation system, do not turn on your irrigation system and let it just run as uh as the calendar and the clock would have it run. So make sure to you can turn it on, you can get it started up, but just turn it off and don't uh leave it, don't turn it on until you absolutely need because what happens is in the spring, if you have your irrigation running, it takes and uh it trains that grass to live in the top uh couple inches of the to have roots that only go in the top couple inches of that soil. And so from there, it stays up there. And then once it actually does get hot and windy and dry and stresses out that plant, it just goes dormant immediately instead of having deep roots where it's able to access that water. And so it gives you some more time and some more resiliency in that turf grass. So it also helps to have a mix of different types of uh species. So having clovers and having other things in that lawn helps with this product project quite a bit. Weeds, learn to love your weeds. If you can't love them, do not spray your entire lawn, just take care of what you need to take care of uh and don't do the whole thing. So May, Labor Day, uh Memorial Day is uh a good time. Half a pound of nitrogen of organic fertilizer per thousand square feet. That is the best time to do that. This is completely antithetical, completely gonna be rejected by if you have a lawn care company, if you have anybody else, they're gonna tell you you're crazy. I'm telling you you're not crazy, you're gonna be okay, and you're gonna stop using as much chemicals, stop using way more chemicals than you need to in your landscape. So, last one is power raking. There's no need, you should not power rake. It does make people feel a lot better, it helps things green up faster. But what it does is it puts uh more sunshine, it helps the soil warm up faster uh by not having that uh grass on top. And that grass on top, the overwintered grass, breaks down as nitrogen, adds fertilizing to your lawns, so you do not have to use as many chemicals on them. So that is there. So this is spring in the lawn care area. So now is a great time to get some seed down before and move forward. Lots I've got really good articles as to how you can do that and how you can move forward with that at a betteryard.org, and then leave your watering off. Then also, this is the time we don't focus on food gardening nearly as much here at A Better Yard than we uh did when we first started out. But now is the time for starting seeds. So if you have tomatoes, like if you want to grow your own tomatoes, now is the time for starting those tomato babies. So those are good things. Tomatoes, cabbages, lettuces, those kinds of things. But you can direct seed things right now. So radishes, carrots, anything in the cool season category of things. So broccoli, cauliflowers, all that you can uh plant directly in the garden right now. You can plant those seeds and uh they will get started when they are ready for it. So that I believe is most of the stuff that we had to talk about through here today. Anyone else have questions on lawn care, on tasks for spring as to where things are going? Got it. Well, I appreciate everybody being here. Uh, if you are a uh member here at a better yard, uh thank you very much for that. I think we have like 37, 38 members, paying members. And so that is wonderful. And so we are um switching over, just so everybody's aware, we're switching over to fully paid model. Now there's not going to be anything free here at a better yard.org. And if you uh are not a uh current paying member of things, I'll get that. You can just click this up here and you can join and just join as a member. There are seasonal memberships now, so you can join with a seasonal membership. So down to it here, so you can get quarterly billing at 97 bucks for a quarter, 37 bucks a month for annual memberships as well. There's a link that you can use. So if you go to that link and you go to a betteryard.org, uh, you can get 30 bucks off for your first month. So if you're not currently a member, you can absolutely join as a member and just for seven bucks for the first month. And so the month of April, we're going to be talking all about maintenance and we're going to be talking all about how uh how we work together to reduce chemicals, to save water, to store carbon, and to feed our pollinator friends. So, can you tell us more about spring organic fertilizer? So, organic fertilizer is actually kind of hard to find. And so there are not a ton of them that are available out there in the markets. But if you go to any garden center, any not like uh below or a home depot, that kind of thing, because they just can't, they're not, this is not made in bulk, and there's just not, you know, thousands of pounds of this that's available and out there. So if you go to a garden center, they will most likely have. So Jody, I know the sailors carries this kind of thing. I also know that um uh track supply had some last time I looked when I was there in prior lake. And uh, so it is usually the way it works is it's turkey-based fertilizer. So it's turkey manure-based fertilizer, and it's mostly mostly nitrogen, and it's it goes down pretty quickly and easily, and it does a great job of getting your spring started faster because it's pretty quick release nitrogen. So I'm sure that most of you have heard me laugh poetically or unpoetically about fertilizer. But with fertilizer, it was not discovered. Nitrogen-based fertilizer wasn't really discovered until we started uh testing atom bombs before World War II. And so it was found that when you heated up petroleum, that it created fertilizer. And so that's the same concept. Uh when you heated up um different forms of nitrogen, it created fertilizer that was available to plants to use. And so the same concept of anytime we have a lightning storm, how it feels in the day after that things are greener and things are healthier and healthier feeling kind of thing. And that's not just a figment of your imagination that is real, because when the lightning superheats the air, our air is mostly nitrogen, but it's not nitrogen that's in a form that's available for plants to use. And so when the lightning strikes, it heats up the nitrogen in the air and it makes it into a usable form of nitrogen, and then it falls down to the ground with the rain, and then it fertilizes everything. And so um turns out atom bombs do the same thing. And so there are when it superheats the air, comes down to the ground, and then it fertilizes everything. So we found out how to make nitrogen-based fertilizers. And so these are all petroleum-based fertilizers the way we do it now. So petroleum has a lot of nitrogen in it, and so we make fertilizer based on out of petroleum. And so now with skyrocketing oil prices and that kind of thing, that will cause all of our fertilizer prices to increase. And so hopefully that causes more people to buy organic fertilizers and move forward there. So I hope that that whole, you know, monologue helped understand a little bit. But half a pound of nitrogen per thousand square feet is what is highly recommended to not use more than that because it will uh a lot of it runs off and it is not used in the future. And so it is uh a good thing to do. So is there a naturally inclined lawn service that you're aware of? Um, yes and no. There are a lot of them um out there. Uh, most of them I do not trust. Uh really ill use or the best things are they'll use organic fertilizers, so that's good. But I don't know of anyone specifically that is really good on lawn care. I would just uh stop using them, uh, is is the number one thing that I would do because they put down way too many chemicals and they have just different goals and different outcomes that they're looking for than either you or I do. Um, I will, I think I've said this before and I've never done it. I will put together a list for commercial applicators that you'll be able to use. And so I'll have that in the maintenance. I'll have that as one of our days in the maintenance month of April. So you can just give us, say you want this and you don't want any uh any additional things, and you can just have uh see what see what your uh lawn care guide will do with that. So I'll put that together for the month of April. Uh, you got a lot, you got a lot of summer tests, including door knocking. So we'll we'll keep working on that as well. So, all right, any other questions for spring stuff? It's been great to have everybody here and uh great to have the band back together again. It's always fun to see folks. So I hope everybody's doing well and that spring will be a brand new season of growth and the world will be a better place. We'll keep we'll keep working on it and figuring it out as we go forward. So thanks very much everybody for being here. If you have questions or need anything, always please, please, please reach out and we'll uh talk again soon. So thanks everybody.