The 6 Best Lawn Care Companies in Eau Claire, WI (An Honest Review)

Green Oasis

Green Oasis opened in 1978 with a single focus on sprinkler system installation, then expanded over the years into landscape design, installation, and maintenance. Today the emphasis is on landscaping and a retail garden center. Services include lawn care programs, landscaping, pest control, snow removal, irrigation, window cleaning, and Christmas lighting.

The breadth is the selling point. If you want one company handling landscape construction, the garden center, and seasonal lighting, that is a real convenience.

TruGreen

TruGreen is the largest lawn care company in the country, serving more than 2.3 million residential and commercial customers with lawn, tree, and shrub care. There are more than 300 branches across the United States and Canada plus roughly 35 franchise locations, and the Eau Claire area is serviced out of the Vadnais Heights branch. Along with several lawn program tiers, TruGreen offers flea and tick control, mosquito prevention, and tree and shrub plans.

Scale brings consistency of process and a wide service menu. Two things worth weighing: a branch serving your area from a distance is a different relationship than a local crew, and large national operations generally see more technician turnover than small companies, which affects how well anyone knows your particular lawn.

Premium Lawn Service

A family owned business that started in 2000 with basic lawn mowing and grew into landscaping, irrigation, snow removal, landscape lighting, and mosquito spray.

The lawn program is a five step liquid application schedule. The first application includes crabgrass prevention and the last focuses on winterization, with the middle rounds combining broadleaf weed control and fertilizer. They also offer products targeting specific weed problems. If you want mowing and treatments from the same company, that combination is less common than it sounds.

NatureScape Lawn and Landscape Care

NatureScape started in Appleton, Wisconsin in 1986 and now operates 38 locations across the Midwest and South. Services include lawn care, pruning, snow removal, mosquito control, tree and shrub care, mowing, aeration, and preventive grub control.

They compete largely on price, which makes them worth a look if budget is the deciding factor. Just compare what is in the program rather than the annual total, since the number of applications and the quality of materials are where low prices usually come from.

Greener Images Lawn Care

Greener Images started in 2004 and specializes in liquid fertilizer and weed control applications. They also offer lime application, grub and insect control, plug aeration, birch tree insecticide, and mole trapping.

Mole trapping is a genuinely useful service to find on a lawn care menu, since most companies do not offer it and moles are a recurring problem on properties with moist, earthworm rich soil.

RainMaster Lawn Systems

Like most of the companies on this list, we started small. Our founder's basement small, in 1999. By 2004 we had built new facilities to house a growing team and equipment. Today we offer three levels of lawn care, irrigation installation and maintenance, commercial snow removal, and pest management across Eau Claire and the Twin Cities.

What we believe, and what shapes the programs: lawn quality is decided below the surface. Healthy soil produces healthy roots, healthy roots produce thick grass, and thick grass crowds out most weeds on its own. Program design follows from that, which is why aeration, soil pH correction, and soil structure are in the upper tiers rather than treated as add-ons.

Who shows up at your house

Our team includes specialists with horticulture degrees, decades of experience, and time spent maintaining the turf at the Milwaukee Brewers. Most of the lawn care industry staffs seasonally. We hire year round, which lets us invest in training and certification through the off season and means the person on your property has done this for more than one summer.

Programs, not visit counts

It is easy to shop on how many visits a company promises. More visits are not automatically better, and a visit where the wrong product goes down in the wrong week is worth nothing. We assess the lawn, then build the program around what it needs.

Three tiers, published prices. Healthy Habitat covers the essentials a better lawn needs. Terrific Turf is the mid level option and our most popular, built to grow a thick green lawn and handle most problems. Luscious Lawn is the proactive high end program for a lawn that needs real repair and an owner who wants results quickly.

At every tier you get granular fertilizer rather than the liquid most competitors use. Granular costs more and breaks down over weeks, feeding the lawn steadily instead of in a spike. The grub control we use is selected to be easier on pollinators than the cheapest products available and to stay active through the season, so it is still working when larvae hatch in late summer.

How to choose between any of them

Six companies, similar service lists. Here is what actually differentiates them, and the questions that surface it.

• Ask what is in the program, application by application. How many rounds, in which windows, and whether grub prevention, pH correction, aeration, and seed are included or extra. Two programs $200 apart are frequently not the same program.
• Ask about the grub control. Whether it stays active into late summer, and what it does to pollinators. Both answers vary widely by product and both affect the price.
• Ask who applies it. Seasonal or year round, trained or certified, and how long the average technician has been there.
• Ask what happens after a visit. Whether you get a call, a written summary, and recommendations, or just an invoice.
• Ask about liquid versus granular fertilizer. Liquid is cheaper and more common. Granular feeds longer. It is a legitimate cost difference you should know you are choosing.
• Ask what happens when you call with a problem. Local office or national call center, and how fast someone gets to the property.

Be confident in the choice

Any company on this list can put product on a lawn. The ones worth hiring can tell you why this lawn needs that product in that week, and will tell you when it does not need anything. If a company cannot explain what it does differently from the one next door, it probably does not do anything differently.