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Off-Season Earnings If winter weather shuts down your landscaping services, here are some opportunities that can add to your bottom line this winter or can be promoted throughout the landscaping season for next winter. Holiday lighting installation and removal may be included in maintenance contracts and has become big business for some landscape companies. Snow and ice removal is probably the most popular winter assignment for landscape contractors. You can also include it in maintenance contracts. Besides snow throwing attachments for tractors and skid steers; shovels, buckets and rotary broom attachments can be used. Walk-behind snow throwers can also be income producers. Less obvious, a hydroseeder can be converted to an anti-icing sprayer to de-ice parking lots, driveways and roads. Making marketable products with landscaping tools is a potential revenue stream. Screeners, like the Pitbull from Lake Erie Portable Screeners, can create topsoil and rock material, from unusable waste. Their website even provides a revenue calculator. Log splitter attachments for skid steers and tractors can make frewood for sale. Restoring weathered decks and cracking concrete surfaces before winter weather causes further damage (or after it has) is a service that fts well for landscape contractors. Rodent proofng houses and businesses using sanitation and exclusion strategies in conjunction with traps and rodent repellents is a service your clients might not even realize the importance of but as the weather cools, rats and mice are known to migrate indoors. Pruning trees and shrubs is often best left to winter because you have a clear view of the shape of deciduous plants. Waiting until late winter allows fresh wounds a short time exposed to the elements before new growth, and the healing process, begins. Dormant spraying of deciduous trees and shrubs to smother the eggs and larvae of pests before they get to the crawler stage in warmer weather can be done in late winter or early spring depending on your area. Spring-cleaning of roads, driveways and parking lots can be done with rotary broom or sweeper attachments for skid steers and tractors. 26 LC DBM