Spring maintenance: Landscape to prevent damage | PEMCO

A friendly reminder: Don't forget the yard as you tackle spring maintenance. It’s the buffer around your home that offers so much more than curb appeal. Thoughtful landscaping can safely channel thousands of gallons of water runoff away from your home, stabilize the soil, and create natural firebreaks that encourage wildfire to burn around, rather than through, your property. 

Fortunately, your love of prevention and natural beauty can go together. Check out our seven landscaping tips to prevent the preventable. 

Landscape to cut risks of water damage, fire, and landslides 

It’s paradoxical when you think about it: Two elements that couldn’t be more opposite – fire and water – hold more combined potential to damage your home than virtually anything else. Fortunately, you can take many of the same steps to prevent damage from both: 

• Manage runoff from roofs. Your roof deflects a mindboggling amount of water – 623 gallons for each inch of rainwater on a 1,000-square-foot roof. (Geek out with us and use this calculator to figure out how much water your roof displaces.) 
   
  If, despite a solid gutter system, you still have soggy spots around your home, consider building a decorative dry creek bed made of gravel or river rock to direct water away from your home. Your yard may even “tell” you where to build it. If you’ve noticed gullies in your landscape carved by downpour runoff, you can widen and cover them with rocks to give the water a controlled flow path. 
   
  Rock also acts as a natural firebreak. Wherever possible, “mulch” with pumice or gravel rather than bark. Bark traps water and, when it’s too close to your house, contributes to rot and insect infestation. During dry months, it provides fuel for wildfires. Although more expensive initially, rock doesn’t require an annual refresh to keep it looking sharp. 
   

• Tend slopes carefully. As the old saying goes, “Water knows no mercy.” We’d add, “And neither does your downslope neighbor.” Ensure your water-management efforts follow building codes, for example, properly directing outflow from downspouts to a dry well or street storm drains. Once landowners make changes to affect runoff (as opposed to just allowing water to go where it will), they may become responsible for the results, including damage to neighboring properties.  
   
  Try to keep excess water on your own property if possible. Some of our favorite fixes:  

  • planting groundcovers to minimize erosion 
  • Incorporating swales to contain runoff 
  • opting for alternatives to paved driveways (more on that below) 
  • planting hardy, well-adapted native shrubs, grasses, and trees to help absorb water and stabilize the soil 

To discourage landslides, avoid irrigating on and above slopes or adding or removing soil. (Adding a retaining wall at the base, however, can be helpful.) Don’t clear vegetation or cut down trees on hills unless they pose a falling hazard. 
 

• Terrace planting beds. If your yard slopes toward your home, terracing your planting beds can slow erosion and allow the soil to absorb water so it doesn’t pool around your foundation or find its way into your basement. Terracing also offers opportunities to add attractive stone pathways and steps that can act as firebreaks. 
   

• Rethink your next big paving project. As much as we love the firebreak effect of paved surfaces, they can worsen problems with runoff since water can’t penetrate concrete or asphalt. Some alternatives: Add gravel strips alongside your pavement to slow runoff and allow water to soak into the ground. Or, instead of paving your entire driveway, consider gravel, spaced pavers, or paving strips with grass planted in between to absorb runoff.  
   

• Landscape to dead-end a fire. As fire seeks fuel, it can burn a path around a home that denies it access to combustible materials. Keep grass mowed and watered within 30 feet of your home and remove dead brush.  

• Prune trees to eliminate brush-to-branch and crown-to-crown contact. Trees capture gallons of runoff during our wet seasons. However, if spaced too closely, they can give wildfire a superhighway to spread during the summer. Prune trees so that the lowest branches (the foliage, not just where the branches attach to the trunk) are at least 15 feet high, and ensure no branches come within 15 feet of your home. Keep tree crowns spaced at least 20 feet apart (so flames can’t jump easily from tree to tree) and clear away debris like fallen leaves and twigs.  
   

•  Don’t stack firewood within 30 feet of your home. 
   

• Protect propane tanks. Clear vegetation away from tanks and surround them with a 10-foot gravel buffer to reduce their risk in a wildfire. 
   

We’re all in on prevention because we’re all in on you    

Prevention isn’t all-or-nothing – and in the case of home and landscape maintenance, lots of little “somethings” add up to make a big difference. If you’d like to know more, check out the PEMCO Blog. It’s loaded with prevention tips that free you to focus on the people and things in life that matter most. 

If you'd like to learn more about what we suggest for spring maintence with prevention in mind, check out these blogs on spring appliance maintenance, spring cleaning, and what to not store your garage or basement.