Tips for Winterizing Your Central Oregon Home and Landscape
Benefits Summary:
- Reduce winter heating costs.
- Avoid costly damage to outdoor faucets.
- Use the cold winter months to create a beautiful landscape this spring.
Fall is the time to get your home ready for winter and a beautiful spring. There’s a great deal that can be done at a minimum of expense or even effort.
- Spread low nitrogen fertilizer on your lawn, ensure that all patio plants drain well and have spacers to keep them off the ground, and insulate the roots of sensitive plants with barkdust or mulch.
- Avoid pruning in the fall since it can stimulate growth that won’t have time to harden off; however your should remove diseased, dead or broken branches or branches that may be compromised by the weight of snow or ice.
- If you have a sprinkler system, you will need to blow out the lines to protect them from freezing. Click for more info on sprinkler blow outs.
Don’t forget to prepare your home for winter as well!
- In late autumn (in Central Oregon this is typically the end of October), shut off outdoor faucets. Do this by shutting off the inside valve and opening the outside valve. This will allow any water to drain.
- Cover faucets with polystyrene faucet covers available at your local home hardware store.
- Because of the cool climate of Central Oregon, if your house has a crawl space, close the foundation vents and block with styrofoam covers you’ll find at the local home improvement center. This will stop the cool air from blowing through and cooling the floor and the house, requiring less energy to heat your home.
- Ensure that skylights and windows are closed tightly to lock out moisture and drafts.
Set aside a weekend now to get your home ready for winter.