There are many aspects to being a successful landscaper. You have to have good customer relations skills. You have to manage and grow your business in a highly competitive and often volatile marketplace. You have to be creative and stay up on the latest trends to make sure you can deliver the beautiful landscapes your clients desire. You have to be a bit of a detective in order to pinpoint the culprit when a lawn or a landscape begins to decline. And you need to have a scientific bent when deciding what types of chemicals – be they fertilizers or pesticides – to apply to a customer’s lawn.
In short, you need lots of different kinds of information in order to do your job effectively.
Hopefully, that’s where Total Landscape Care enters the picture. From the very beginning, we’ve been adamant that each issue be filled with solid business information, great photography and artistically oriented ideas that cover the many facets of being a successful landscaper. And this month we continue that trend by launching our all-new “Chemical Specification Chart” series.
We decided to make our mark by starting big: The “Chemical Specification Charts” on herbicides (beginning on Page 29) is 13 pages long. That’s a pretty hefty chunk of information to digest, so we took extra care to ensure that each chart is presented in a convenient, easy-to-use format.
Compiled by our “Chemical Care” editor Cindy Ratcliff, these charts will appear in Total Landscape Care eight times this year, offering you a comprehensive, quick-reference guide to every landscaping chemical on the market today. Look for these chemical guides in coming months:
March – Fertilizer/pesticide combination products
April – Plant growth regulators
May – Insecticides
June – Fungicides
July – Adjuvants/wetting agents
August – Non-selective herbicides
December – Vertebrate pest controls
Following the tradition established by our bilingual “Safety Watch” column and our popular “Scrapbook” feature at the end of each issue, we believe our “Chemical Specification Charts” will prove to be a powerful and invaluable tool when you’re out on the job doing your best to make customers happy.
