LAWN CARE: SERVICES LOOKING TO NEXT YEAR'S CUSTOMERS

If you've grown weary of mowing the clearing around your home or business, it may be too late to hire one of the area's larger lawn maintenance services to relieve you of the drudgery.

But some local lawn businesses say it's never to early to inquire about next year.

Teen Challenge International of Mid-America, a Christian residential rehabilitation program for young men with life-controlling problems, does mowing and trimming. But if you're not among Teen Challenge's 160 customers, your name will be tacked on a waiting list.

Teen Challenge's lawn service is a component of its work-experience program. Its goal is to instill in the men a good work ethic, said Beverly Breithaupt, an administrative assistant.

The rehab program has five crews of five men each brandishing large-blade walk-behind mowers, standard mowers and weed-eaters. Mondays are devoted mostly to commercial lawns and Fridays to churches. The rest of the week is spent on residential tracts, many owned by senior citizens.

Most lawns are mowed once a week. The first time a yard is cut, the owner pays $5 an hour a worker. After that Teen Challenge and the customer settle on a price. The money is paid to Teen Challenge and helps pay for the young men's free stay in the program.

Breithaupt said Teen Challenge has been mowing lawns in Cape Girardeau for at least 20 years. "When we first started doing it, there were not that many (lawn services)," she said. "But I think there are quite a few now."

Among them is Wormington Lawn Care, which services Scott City, Kelso and Cape Girardeau.

In addition to mowing and trimming, Wormington manicures shrubbery and does some landscaping.

"Most lawn services will do landscaping," said Cheryl Wormington, who owns the business with her husband, Marvin Wormington Jr. "Sometimes that's their main focus and sometimes that's their secondary focus."

Wormington serves about 100 customers, about half residential and half commercial, doing such services as mulching leaves, fertilizing ground and breaking up turf to aid growth.

The work year begins in early March when Wormington contacts the previous year's customers. Work ends in mid-December, when the business helps people with Christmas yard-decorating.

Wormington said a lawn service not only saves you the sweat of mowing but also beautifies your yard.

"We try to stick with mulching equipment, which means that the grade of cutting is a lot better because you can't tell where we've been -- we don't leave the clumps of grass like some people will," she said.

"We mulch it up or we go back over it until it looks like it's manicured," she said. "A commercial-grade mower will do a better job of that than just the run-of-the-mill Murray. The Murray just doesn't have the capacity of chopping up the grass that fine."

"And if there's a problem with the ground or your grass looks yellow, a lawn service will be able to fix that," she said. "If you buy fertilizer at Lowe's and try to do it yourself, you may not know what to do."

She said her business begins taking requests for lawn maintenance in late fall for the next spring. "People usually get tired of mowing their yard at the end of June, and by then everybody's full," she said.

As for cost, she said a yard's size and terrain must be examined before an estimate is given. And more detailed maintenance costs more.

During winter, some lawn services, such as Green Acres Lawn and Landscaping in Jackson, offer snow removal. But when there's no white stuff, "we spend about four months ... doing a whole lot of nothing," Green Acres owner Gary Leadbetter said.